Pirated Music and Intellectual Property

[linuxlover42]

I've recently been exposed to a huge number of websites centered around many people's belief that DRM should be abolished and music should be free to everyone. These sites range from logical arguements to all out rage speeches about the nazi record companies and their evil ways. My question is, why should music be free? Many professional musicians get most of their money from record deals and producing albums and getting them out into the world is almost the only way to achieve any real fame as a musician. Why should we not pay for the hard work (it may be fun but musicians still work hard) that these people put in? I understand that record companies pocket a huge share of the earnings but isn't this a problem in the setup of modern record companies. Believe me, I have no love for modern record companies because their greed has spawned a generation of musicians who know nothing about sophisticated music; nevertheless, why should we not pay for someone else's hard work?

Opinions (please keep your posts civilized, I don't appreciate hate speeches)

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

both piracy and DRM are wrong
DRMing your content is like saying i am using DRM take that pirates, someone is going to say challenge accepted
DRM prevents stuff from being usable on certain devices/software
piracy takes potential profits way
some people pirate so they don't have to worry about drm
a true pirate will pirate regardless
it does not really matter how much drm is used it will get cracked in the end, they would make more if there was no DRM on anything, as long as they market it as drm free

[linuxlover42]

I do agree that DRM can be a royal pain in the backside and I tend to agree it's not a good thing. But piracy is still wrong and I don't understand those people who truly believe that all music shoul be free, if you want free music, go listen to Pandora or go on youtube and find one of the millions of talented artists who feel the need to share their talent with the world on that site (or just look up music videos)

[fontis]

An artist once said that the purpose of his art was not to profit, but to enlighten the world with art.
There are millions of musicians, painters, poets and other artists out there who release all their content "free". And they all can live perfectly fine with it.
The reasoning I asked was because they instead held exhibitions. Patrons would pay the artist to perform live and they would gain money in that way, much like every musician does now.

The only thing which would differ, financially speaking, would be to remove the record companies from the whole equation. And they are the real ones who make money on the records anyway, not the artist. And this whole DRM battle and the likes of it comes not from the majority of the artists, but from the label companies who want to maintain their cash flow.

The truth is that most of the western world is extremely consumption oriented. So the point of all of this is just to simply max out profit in every single way.

That being said. I support my favorite artists by giving money to them, not to the label companies.

[monkeybrain2012]

Your argument falsely assumes that DRM actually stops piracy, well it doesn't and never will. It only hassles the legit customers, it may backfire if it gets too far because at some point even paying customers may get pissed off to the point that he or she would simply download, that was what happened with Apple music.

BTW, my favourite local bands make money by live performance, if you buy a ticket you get a free CD, and believe me, the CD is more like a promo, there is nothing like live music.

[WinterMadness]

I've recently been exposed to a huge number of websites centered around many people's belief that DRM should be abolished and music should be free to everyone. These sites range from logical arguements to all out rage speeches about the nazi record companies and their evil ways. My question is, why should music be free?

How can you justify the ownership of information?

Many professional musicians get most of their money from record deals

Thats not really true, record labels make more money off of record sales than musicians do. Musicians tend to make money off of merch sales and such, oddly enough now record labels want to get into that, and musicians can keep a small fraction of THOSE sales... give me a break...

Why should we not pay for the hard work (it may be fun but musicians still work hard) that these people put in?

We dont reward hard work (people who do manual labor often make minimum wage and work over nights), we reward ownership of property and manipulation of finances. Im trying to keep this vague so that I dont spark a political conversation here.

[buzzingrobot]

Here's my take:

If I make something -- a song, a book, a painting, an apple pie, whatever -- then I, and I alone, get to decide if, and how, anyone else has access to it. In other words, I hold all the rights to the thing I created. No one else has any rights to it unless and until I transfer those rights to them.

The legal concepts of copyright and intellectual property were intended to protect those rights. They don't create them. Laws only acknowledge , protect, or inhibit the exercise of rights. They can't create them.

Nothing mystical exists that gives anyone else a creator's rights in something he or she has made. The anti-IP and anti-copyright crowd seems to argue that when someone makes something everyone else on the planet magically owns it. That's wish-fulfillment nonsense.

On the other side, we have the corporate abuses of IP and copyright which, in their own way, are as destructive of a creator's rights and the principles underlying copyright and IP law.

*Both* camps are cynically crafting and leveraging ideology in pursuit of their own selfish, materialistic, objectives.

[Grenage]

DRM is optional, and the vast, vast majority of the population neither know of or care about it.

If you don't like it, don't shell out. The main problem is that there is rarely a DRM free alternative, because DRM is generally applied to unique products, such as music, novels, and other media.

[mastablasta]

aaargh!

i use drm on my products. but the drm is counting more on good of the people (is there much of that still arround?) rather than hinder any access or anything like that. it can be easilly removed with a bit of knowhow.

[lykwydchykyn]

The music industry as we know it came into being as a result of the technological limitations of the first few generations of sound recording and reproduction systems, specifically that sound recordings were tied inextricably to a physical medium. This physical medium cost money to produce and could be sold per-copy for a profit. The entire 20th century music industry was built on this.

Digital technology, combined with the internet and ubiquitous computing, pretty much wiped out these limitations. You can copy an album with a couple mouse clicks and send it across the world in microseconds.

Now you have a multi-billion-dollor industry representing millions of jobs that has had its profitability rug yanked out from under it.

Their basic choices were:

- build a completely new industry that doesn't rely on the old technological limitations
- Try to recreate and enforce the old technological limitations on the new technology

Since almost nobody has yet managed to figure out option one, they went for option two. This is DRM.

Hopefully you can see why people are against DRM. Introducing artifical limits to technology so that one sector can make money is bound to irritate people.

I just want to say, too, that as a former recording artist, composer, and producer, I find most anti-IP explanations of how the music industry can continue without copyright laws and so forth painfully naive and short-sighted. Philosophically I tend to agree, but historically there aren't a whole lot of unpaid amatuers whose work is remembered.