Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Yeah, you're right. In my opinion though...it's not the companies that produced the contents fault. They are simply trying to stay alive. And I don't think anybody has ever had a problem with people sharing shit with their buddies.
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Robbie, I always highly value your opinion as both clear and balanced, seriously - thanks for taking the time out of your day to post!
But here I think you make a logical mistake. If it was ok to copy a record in the 80's with/for your friends, in reality I'm not doing anything different today if I were to share a new song with my friends on Facebook. True, it's much easier, many more can do it, it takes less time to produce thousands of copies and with the help of Internet it can be available for being copied around the clock.
But in reality that is really the only thing that has happened. It's much easier to faster produce a massive amount of copies. In principle, it's still doing exactly the same thing, different technology but the outcome is the same. Based on that principle, one could argue that today's craving for "free" is based or fostered from and among those who learned back in the 80's that it was ok.
Make no mistake about it, I strongly oppose copying, file sharing, torrents and the like. Have I tried them, sure, like most everybody else. I quess we're all children of our own time. Just as you say it was ok back in the 80's, one could say today it's ok to copy cd's, videos and so on. The problem is of course the scale, now one illegal copy can slip out and then pretty much ruin the whole product, practically overnight one illegal copy of a song can be in every American home and most listeners in the Western hemisphere. It would have taken an awful lot of time and arrangements to produce that vast amount of copies on regular tapes, and many child copies far out in the family tree would be of so degenerated quality it would not be pleasant to listen to.
Do I think that something need to change in order for content producer's, musicians and other creative artists can earn a living and even take an occasional economical hit if something turns out to not be popular/sell at all? Yes, absolutely. But the only real difference is speed, and that you and I don't need to know each other today to still be able to share/copy a new song.
Not here to bash you in any way, but saying that it was ok at one time and then turn kind of cripples the argument. Speed, preserved quality and easy of contact/organization are the only differences, the principle - copied content - is still the same.