[quote name=\'GS Warehouse\' date=\'Jul 21 2003, 08:41 PM\'] OK, I'm only going to say this once:
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Good, because after I'm done with you you're gonna look pretty stupid if you try to say it again.
There is word that the authorities are collecting and tracking the IP addresses of all who use file-sharing services--and have the right to arrest anyone found with one of those addresses.
They can't arrest just anyone. There are LOTS and LOTS of VERY LEGITIMATE uses for those systems. If the RIAA is truly so stupid as to randomly sic the authorities on anyone using any of the aforementioned programs (and it's ENTIRELY possible that they are), then all it takes is one slipup, one potshot at the wrong guy, and they are done for. They don't exactly have a positive image in the public eye right now, and the law is currently on their side, if it's applied to the right people.
but I have been told recently that simply recording a song off the radio is just as illegal.
Whoever told you that is quite full of what makes the grass grow green. Recording the radio for personal use falls under so many \"fair use\" laws that it's not even funny.
(By the way, making an MP3 for my own use from a CD I own, be it to play on my PC or load onto my MP3 player, is covered by those same laws. So if the RIAA wants to come sniffing around my PC (and trust me, with the security I have set up, they won't get close), they had better be able to prove the origin of each and every file on my PC has come from a nefarious source. And they can't.)
The crackdown only started when the recording industry discovered they lost so much money because of music piracy.
Yeah. They're losing TRILLIONS. Look at the pay structure for record company CEOs and say that to me again with a straight face.
Our freedom is in danger only because millions of people want to listen to music without paying for it.
I ask you what the bigger crime is: perpetuating a business model that encourages charging $20 to buy an entire CD for the one song you want, or downloading an MP3 (which is NOT a perfect copy, despite all of the record company propaganda being shoved up the orifice of your choice) of a song that I wouldn't otherwise buy, usually because the album in question is long out of print?
The fact is, if they took the time to figure out how to work WITH the system instead of against it, they would learn that they can still turn a tidy profit selling MP3's themselves. The fact that any idiot out there can rip a song from a CD now, and that most of said idiots do so BADLY, is the music industry's best weapon, but the industry is so caught up in their own puffery and sabre rattling that they refuse to see it. If they took single songs and charged me $1 for a 128Kbit, 100% guaranteed clean rip, or $2 for the same in a 320K flavor, I'd pay for the download in a New York minute.
But they're greedy and unwilling to let go of that $20-for-one-song profit margin. Obviously, in the case of the Game Show theme CD's, the money is worth spending because the majority of the tracks are worth having. But the days of a superalbum like Huey Lewis And The News's \"Sports\" or Def Leppard's \"Hysteria\", where fully half of the album consisted of released singles that received radio airplay are long since over. Today, it's \"write one hook song, fill up the rest with crap, and move on to the next album\". Why the HELL should I support that?
