Mpaa Blames Bittorrent For Ep3 Prerelease

Epidemic · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (ZeroByte @ May 21 2005, 10:23 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>The music industry thinks it's not selling enough CD's. They blame P2P networks, and to some extent they might be right.
Their solution? They went up the government and asked a law be passed on a tax (for the music company) on Optic media, Hard Drives, and any Flash Card/USB key, to "compensate for the loss" because it's obvious that whenever you burn a CD, it's because you're just off of emule or bt.
Basically, you're paying the music industry because people are downloading, without getting anything back.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>

Seems like a pretty popular thing for the various MPA* of the world to champion. I've heard of similar "taxation" in other places. I've even heard of this being done on HDD MP3 players. It's.. argh. Mind boggling how governments of different countries allow such things to pass through. </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Isnt this what happened to blank VCR tapes?

Bry · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Epidemic @ May 22 2005, 12:29 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (ZeroByte @ May 21 2005, 10:23 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> </div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>The music industry thinks it's not selling enough CD's. They blame P2P networks, and to some extent they might be right.
Their solution? They went up the government and asked a law be passed on a tax (for the music company) on Optic media, Hard Drives, and any Flash Card/USB key, to "compensate for the loss" because it's obvious that whenever you burn a CD, it's because you're just off of emule or bt.
Basically, you're paying the music industry because people are downloading, without getting anything back.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>

Seems like a pretty popular thing for the various MPA* of the world to champion. I've heard of similar "taxation" in other places. I've even heard of this being done on HDD MP3 players. It's.. argh. Mind boggling how governments of different countries allow such things to pass through. </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Isnt this what happened to blank VCR tapes?  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
its already done with music audio cd-r's Not the kind you use in a pc burner but in the kidn you use in a standalone cd burner

Quaunaut · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (MedHead @ May 21 2005, 08:37 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> If the music is so bad, why are people downloading it?

And no, I can't throw aside morality. Wrong is wrong, no matter how much it benefits someone. </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Woah woah woah, wait a second here. If were going purely after Morality, no matter how you look at it Medhead, file sharing is <b>good</b>.

People buy more CDs from many more different artists.

Artists get heard by many more people.

Whos losing here? Everyone is getting more money overall, and the artists love being heard by more people! Your logic is seriously flawed.

Really, the only bad thing about this is that it forces the artists to work harder on their music, and produce higher quality stuff, because people won't buy the entire CD if they hear the other tracks on it(other than the one they loved) and say "Screw that".

And Medhead, did you know that for every 1 person that d/ls an entire album from an artist, another 3 to 4 THOUSAND download only 1 song or 2 from it. And note that I'm looking at studies and facts(reported in a older issue of PC Magazine, in one of Dvorzak's rants), not from 'hopefuls'.

Frankly, they could probably make a ton more money if they took the mentality of Google <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' />

AllUrHiveRblong2us · May 2005

Oh damn, a file-sharing argument with medhed and I missed it this time?

I feel unfulfilled.

Monkfish · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (AllUrHiveRblong2us @ May 22 2005, 04:05 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Oh damn, a file-sharing argument with medhed and I missed it this time?

I feel unfulfilled.  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
There's allways next time <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad-fix.gif' />

BlackMage · May 2005

i will admit to downloading appleseed before its na release, it's the only reason i bought it.
i also shared it with a friend, he should have it now.

fileshare upped sales by two. at least.

ZeroByte · May 2005

My problem with the argument that the MPAA/RIAA have the moral right because of the legal right is that as it currently stands intellectual property, copyright and copyright protection laws have been in some way or another been bought for by the MPAA/RIAA. When they were originally devised, copyright laws attempted to strike a relatively good balance between profits and the public good. Now the MPAA/RIAA have sullied the good intentions of the original laws by extensive lobbying and campaign contributions. They've managed to create laws that punish people far more severely than other criminals who commit far more heinous offenses. Do the MPAA/RIAA have the legal right to punish people? I unequivocally say yes. Do they have the moral right to do it? As it stands right now, I am unsure. Under the original intent of copyright laws, yes they do and yet the fact that they have augmented the original laws with their own laws that have been bought and paid for makes me unsure of their moral right to do so.

BlackMage · May 2005

it really depends on your point of view:

you have the consumers, fileshare is good. more music == more happy

you have the record company, fileshare is bad. more sales == more money

you have the artists who love the music and love the fans, fileshare is good. more people listen to music == more people at concerts == warm fuzzy feeling

you have the artists who are in it for the money, fileshare is bad. more sales == more money

notice a pattern?

edit: ZeroByte: i stole one of your sig links, just so you know ^^

Cereal_KillR · May 2005

Note that most "artists" are also in a contract with the music industry

esuna · May 2005

*sigh*

Blame the end users, not the source. Really. The release in question, as far as i've seen, is a pre-release DVD work print, now who's to blame for this? Is it the people who have found a random torrent from one of the multitude of sites, or is it the person working in whatever company that was trusted with the DVD workprint who released it to "the scene" that is at fault here? The way the MPAA and RIAA throws around accusations that the BitTorrent users or Kazaa users are the main ones at fault here are becoming more and more ridiculous as time goes on.

"The scene" has a hierachy. There's the main groups at the top with all the you-will-never-ever-find-ultra-private dumps for the latest 0-sec stuff as soon as it's available, hence the term 0-sec, which they usually are the cause for making it available by obtaining the media themselves, then it goes down through other still pretty secret places through different groups, couriers, then it starts getting more and more public, and eventually, your average user can grab it from www.omgzwehavtehtorrents!!1.com within mere hours of it's preliminary release.

Your average user isn't stealing or obtaining this material from the source, they're not the guys ripping a pre-release DVD or recording a CAM / TS of a movie in a cinema, no, they're the guy that sits at home and leeches.

While i'm not even in the slightest saying that joe public downloading a movie, game or cd from the internet isn't at fault, since whatever way you look at it, piracy <i>is</i> wrong and quite illegal, but they need to actually step back and start focusing on the root of the problem here, not the end result.

I mean, you sue or arrest, sieze or obtain the end "user" or their hardware and all you have is one less person leeching, you take down a release group who have contacts in X publisher or Y company, and you have yourself several thousand end users that won't be downloading it, why? Because the people actually leaking this stuff will be stopped. Or at least hindered.

But no, they much prefer the tactics of scaremongering and threatening your average teenage internet user who just downloaded a new album before release rather than actually focusing in the <i>real problem</i>.

And blaming something like BitTorrent for the mass-piracy of a movie is purely ridiculous, whilst you're at it, you may as well blame FTP, HTTP, Newsgroups, eMule, Kazaa, eXeem, FlashFXP and BitTorrent all at the same time, because i can guarentee you that each one of those protocols or programs are all used in the process of distributing any pirate release.

xioutlawix · May 2005

Why do I get the distinct impression that medhead's die-hard 'YOU DOWNLOAD THE MUSIC YOU GO TO <i>THE HELL</i>' is religiously motivated?

To reiterate what THEM said, the law might be the law, but that doesn't make it morally just. Telling me I have to pay $20 for a cd to get that one song I liked from the radio just to find out the rest of the album is filler is, well...broken.

Would I be upset if I was an artist and found out that out of a potential of 2000 cd's to sell, I managed to sell 1600, and the other 400 people downloaded them? Yes...if I were too much of an extreme leftist mule to realize that of those 400 people, quite a few of them probably wouldn't have bought my cd to begin with had filesharing not been present, or taking into consideration the fact that of those people who downloaded it, some might actually like my work and consider a future purchase. Otherwise, I could live with it.

Let's try not to deal in absolutes and fire and brimstone here.

BlackMage · May 2005

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (MedHead @ May 21 2005, 10:37 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> If the music is so bad, why are people downloading it?

And no, I can't throw aside morality. Wrong is wrong, no matter how much it benefits someone.  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
is something really wrong if it brings good?

someone needs a POV shift

ZeroByte · May 2005

You know what, I've was reading through the DRM Sucks link in my sig again and I found this quote that really hits home on the morals argument.

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>

UltimaGecko · May 2005

I have over 700 songs on my computer; funny thing is: of the 30 most listened to 24 I own on CD.

The reason I don't buy CDs is the over priced nature of a piece of plastic with paper inserts - you don't need a 1400% profit to pay your underpaid artists.

I'd also like to note something:

Of the songs I have downloaded, they're either:

1. Oldies
2. Foreign

Both of which are near impossible to find/extremely expensive to ship. Anything I download I wouldn't use if I hadn't downloaded it.

Things the RIAA doesn't take into account:
1. Purposeful boycotts against their CD prices.
2. People who can't afford the CD in the first place.
3. People that are sampling, to buy later.
4. People who wouldn't buy the CD (based on taste or quality).
5. People who are downloading something they would borrow from their friends if P2P didn't exist.
6. Convienence (lost CDs, not wanting to copy, different versions of the same song) - probably the lowest common of the 6.

It may not be legally right (neither was treason against your mother country; welcome to the US <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /> ), but that doesn't meant it's morally wrong. Man, that has some weird 'revolution!' vibe to it for some reason.

I'd also appreciate it if you guys would just stop pulling numbers out of various orifices - people supporting the RIAA will give lower numbers for sales percentages; dessenters will give higher (as witnessed in this thread already). I'd like to note that I know about 20 people who downloaded Shrek when it was in theatres - all of them now own a DVD copy...

DrSuredeath · May 2005

What the "place where bad people go when they die"!

This Off-Topic thread is so closed to being a good intelligent discussion.

If you asked me, I tends to view this tool as Radio and VCR.
Downloadable music is simply a new form of radio. Likewise torrented movies and VCR.

But the deal with Episode III is that it has just been released, that's ****. That's illegal VHS tape right there.

Javert · May 2005

In other news:

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" sold an estimated $108.5 million worth of tickets for the Friday-to-Sunday period, taking its total to $158.5 million since it opened after midnight on Thursday.

Its four-day haul sets a new record, surpassing the $134.3 million tally of 2003's "The Matrix Reloaded." Its Thursday tally of $50 million also set a one-day record, beating the $44.8 million sum for "Shrek 2" last year.

The three-day weekend record is held by "Spider-Man," which opened to almost $115 million in 2002. "Revenge of the Sith" narrowly pipped "Shrek 2," which opened with $108 million. Rankings could change when final data are issued on Monday.

The new "Star Wars" film easily beat the opening weekends of its two most recent predecessors, all of which were released by Twentieth Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.
</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>

Cyndane · May 2005

So in other words, the leaking of the torrent did not affect sales one bit. :-)

HellspawnUK · May 2005

Very few things are actually seriously affected by copywrite infringment and the like. It's always that for the billions of $ these companys make due to copies/leaks they might lose a few million. Which is nothing compared to what they make, but thats where greed comes in, always for the most profit, never for the consumer.

TommyVercetti · May 2005

Hmm... Everyone I know who downloads music or movies <b>would not have paid for it even if it meant not having it.</b>

They can't lose sales that were never there.

Cold_NiTe · May 2005

HEY GUYS SOMEONE HELP SEED THIS METALLICA TORRENT.

...

YOU DIDN'T SEE NOTHING.

Mpaa Blames Bittorrent For Ep3 Prerelease

Comments