Repeat Songlifting Offendor…
The Record Industry wants to talk to you.
Wait! It’s not about file sharing! We promise!
See, when one person makes a copy of a song and gives it to another person—
Where are you going? We swear it’s not about file sharing!
Okay. So young people like to make copies of songs, see? And they put them on these outmoded delivery systems that use a storage device called a ‘CD.’ It’s pronounced like it’s spelled. Then these young people take these CD’s and give them to each other for free.
The Record Industry wants you to know that that’s wrong. That’s very, very wrong. In fact, the Record Industry wants you to know that it’s worse than filesharing.
Among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free. Similarly, 58% thought it was legal to copy a friend’s purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19% thought copying was legal if the movie wasn’t purchased.
Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers “schoolyard” piracy — copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates — a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.
See, here’s the thing.
I remember buying a couple of CD’s back in the days before you could download music off the interweb. This was the typical scene. I would walk up to the counter with my CD’s and my money in hand. The clerk would ring the CD’s up. Then, invariably, the clerk would turn and gesture to a display of blank cassettes sitting right next to the register.
And the clerk would say, ‘Would you like some blank tapes with that? This brand is special and makes near-perfect copies of CD’s.’
Criminal masterminds! Corrupting our youth!
See, ‘schoolyard piracy’ has been going on for ages. You can find any number of people who are willing to confess to it. And in most cases, it actually seems to be legal under federal copyright law (civil or state laws, however, may apply).
Even lawyers say the law is hard to understand. Distributing free copies of a purchased CD or DVD is only a federal copyright crime if the value of the copied discs exceeds $1,000, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Elena Duarte.
I need to track this down and see if it says the value of the album or the value of the media – ‘cuz $1,000 is a lot of blank discs.
The argument that peer-to-peer filesharing was a plague that had to be wiped out when friend-to-friend copying has always been par for the course went something like this. If I buy a CD and make copies for my friends, I also buy blank media. I then have to copy said media, which takes time and equipment. I then distribute these to my friends, which also takes time. On top of that, there’s a limit to the number of friends a single person has that they can hand the copied CD to.
Meanwhile, p2p filesharing allows copies to appear anywhere on the world in a few minutes’ time. You don’t have to know the person you’re giving the copy to – they just have to be connected to the same network. And it doesn’t really take that much time to make a copy any more, because you can make many copies simultaneously.
But after years of selling that argument, the RIAA wants to say that li’l Billy handing a couple of burned CD’s to a girl he likes in homeroom is worse than all of the filesharing they’ve been filing massive lawsuits about.
These numbers don’t reflect a new trend toward schoolyard piracy – that’s been around as long as there’s been home recording capabilities. I will tell you what these numbers reflect, however. They reflect that kids expect to be able to use what they paid for. In the case of both CD’s and DVD’s, over half of the kids presume legality for copying legitimately-purchased media, and under a quarter of the kids presume legality if media was either stolen or even rented.
August 11th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
The record industry, I am convinced, by and large hates its consumers, and it isn’t all too fond of music when you come right down to it.
I think it’s ridiculous. Mix tapes or CDs are a way of saying, “Hey, I think these songs are cool. I hope you do, too.” Then, if the person who receives the tape or CD does think they’re cool, that person will probably seek out more music by the same artists. There are bands I would have never known about, whose albums I would never have purchased, had I not first heard one of their songs on a mix.
They’ve got a decent argument against file sharing, even if their tactics and rhetoric have been fairly reprehensible. But this is just stupid and short-sighted.
Which is very much in keeping with the RIAA.