Why is shoplifting wrong?
Because you're ripping off the shop who paid money for the specific product you are stealing.
Why do record companies not care about shoplifting, because they have already been paid for the stolen cds.
Why is p2p different from shoplifting? Because the marginal cost of production for every copy of a song after the original master approaches zero (and actually is zero a lot of the time) The only loss to the record industry is the 'lost sale' which was by no means guaranteed even without the 'theft'. (If one person downloads a thousand songs from the internet, the loss to the record industry is nowhere near as much as the value of those thousand songs because the person who downloaded them almost certainly would not have been prepared to purchase each song individually (even if they were available)
It also ignores the fact that most people who download music do so to hear music that they would otherwise not get a chance to hear without buying the cd. (Radio stations tend to play only a very limited selection of music). It is highly unreasonable to expect someone to spend €20 or more to buy a CD of a band he/she has never heard. Lots of people download songs and then go off and buy the CD if they think it is worth their money and would like to add the record to their collection.
The record industry are greedy bastards who deserve to be pissed on at every single opportunity (there are some exceptions to this statement, some independent labels are worth supporting, but these labels are usually not affiliated with the RIAA)
Akrasia
Ireland
August 2004
FEB 10, 2005 03:38 PM