The music industry has been concerned for years over digital music piracy. Someone can take a CD, rip the audio tracks from it, convert them to MP3 format, and post them on a website, peer-to-peer network, ftp site, or any of many other places where they can be downloaded for free by visitors to the site. This bothers the music industry. They are continually saying that CD sales are dropping, and it's exclusively the fault of online pirate P2P networks, the like of Napster, KaZaA, Gnutella, and others.
The fact that the music industry was one of the big proponents in the push to digital media in the first place doesn't make me sorry one bit, but that's not the point. The point is, the music industry is claiming that people are copying music, and this is directly, and, if we are to believe various music industry executives, almost solely responsible for the decline in CD sales as of late.
On the surface, this seems logical. People copy music, so they no longer have to buy CD's. However, there are many factors which the music industry has failed to take into account.
Recession
The first, and most obvious of these is the fact that we're in a recession. The whole economy is slower than it was 5 years ago, so why shouldn't the music industry take a hit with the rest of us?
Technology spending is down. Does this mean people are making copies of computers, so they don't have to buy new ones? Of course not. It simply means people are buying fewer computers.
Help wanted ads are down in the newspaper. Does that mean companies are copying workers they already have, so they don't need to hire new people? Again, who ever heard of something so silly?
Why then, in a slow economy, does the music industry assume that the only cause of slower CD sales is online piracy? Just as a new home computer is a luxury in a slow economy, so is that new CD box set that you want. If you don't have enough money coming in, the last thing you're going to do is go out to the music store and buy a CD for $23.99.
For some reason, though, the music industry can't quite grasp the basics of economics. Whether they think their product is so good that there's simply no way anyone could possibly do without it, or their fat bonuses for signing the next copycat boy band don't let them see that there is in fact a recession going on, I don't know. I do know, however, that there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between the brains of the executives at the Recording Industry Association of America, and the real world.
Fair Use
Now, I'm not about to claim that giving copies of your music to all your friends and lots of people you never met is fair use. Some people seem to think that it is, as long as you're not charging for it. I don't see it that way. Playing a CD at a party where some of your friends can listen to it is fair use. Making a compilation of your favourite songs from several of your CD's to play at the same party is fair use.
Downloading and keeping MP3's of songs you don't have originals of, and have no intention of buying, is not fair use. This is copyright violation. RIAA executives seem to think that this is the only use of P2P networks. I would like to suggest another, however, for which I have used both Gnutella and KaZaA myself, plenty of times. I have a quite large record collection, of some 1600 albums. Not CD's. Vinyl. Records have a tendency to get scratches, which affect the sound of the recording, and sometimes make the record unplayable without damaging your turntable. This is especially so when a lot of these albums have been purchased at yard sales, flea markets, and other such places, where the previous owner was, shall we say, less than meticulous with caring for their records.
Once I have an original vinyl LP, with some of my favourite songs on it, I can download MP3's of all these songs, and store the LP in some dusty corner of my basement. This is fair use. I may never actually listen to the record itself, but I have an original, which was paid for, therefore I have a right to have a recording of that music in another format. The fact that the MP3 didn't come from the record is beside the point, as the copyright licence covers the song itself, not the medium it came from.
Try Before You Buy
Many software companies have a philosophy that an expensive piece of software should have a way to try a demo copy, before the customer lays out a large investment in a program that might not even do what they want after they get it. This approach has served these companies well, with many sales coming from people and companies who first tried the demo version of the software, found it to be satisfactory to their needs, and purchased the full version.
This is the most heinous crime imaginable to the music industry. Every time a song is listened to, there must have already been a royalty payment to the companies involved. Never mind the fact that many P2P users who have been interviewed have stated that they have found artists they liked on P2P services, then gone out and bought the CD. Never mind the fact that studies done of P2P service usage have found that the heaviest users of such services are in fact the largest purchasers of new music, rather than the other way around.
Copy protection
Yes, copy protection will prevent casual copying of CD's. It will even prevent some of the less technically savvy of us from putting protected CD tracks on the internet and P2P services. It will not, however, completely cut out music piracy. No matter how hard you try to clamp down, there will be someone out there who's smarter than the person who designed your copy protection scheme. The people who do this kind of thing aren't in it for the free music, however. They're in it to beat the system.
It used to be that people would use portable dual cassette stereos with high-speed dubbing to make a copy of a cassette tape. Yes, the copy sounded bad. No, they didn't have to pay for it. But chances are you could count on one hand the number of times they listened to this tape, before going on to copy another one. I got a rack full of cassettes given to me at the end of a yard sale where I picked up some records a while ago. Over 95% of these tapes were copies, they all sounded terrible, even the ones that were made on high quality Chrome and Metal tapes, and there must have been close to 100 of them. Did they listen to them? Well, they were giving them away, so probably not. None of them looked particularly worn or well used. But they had them. Are they guilty of large-scale piracy? Well, at an average of 8 to 9 songs per tape, there was roughly 800 to 900 songs that, presumably, hadn't been paid for. This is, of course, assuming that they didn't have the CD's, and they had simply copied them to cassette so they could play them in their car stereo. That would have been fair use. They didn't, however, give massive numbers of copies away, sell them, or whatever else the music industry claims pirates do. Honestly, I don't even think they enjoyed them that much when they had them.
The Comparison to Conventional Theft
There is frequently a comparison made between pirating music, and stealing cars, bicycles, purses, etc. There's even a TV commercial I've seen recently from 'The Canadian Coalition Against Satellite Signal Theft', which states that stealing a satellite signal is no different from stealing a car, bicycle, or purse. Presumably, this would apply to any intellectual property.
Well, I'm not here to tell anyone that I think stealing IP is OK, because I don't. It is, however, fundamentally, and totally different from stealing anything physical.
If I stole my neighbour's car, he'd notice within at most a few hours that his car was missing. If I stole a bicycle downtown, the owner would know as soon as they went to get on it to ride home. If I stole a purse, there would be a woman somewhere who wouldn't be able to buy her child an ice-cream cone, because she wouldn't have the money that was in her purse.
The point is, when someone steals an object of some sort, the original owner no longer has it. The person who rightfully owns it has to do without, or go to the trouble of replacing it, because someone stole it.
Intellectual Property, on the other hand, is different. If I make a copy of a CD that a friend has, that friend isn't missing the CD. It's still in their CD case, just like it always has been. If I did it when they weren't there, they wouldn't even know I'd made a copy, since there's nothing changed at all as far as they see. The only way they'd know is if I told them, or they looked at the contents of my CD case.
Somehow, the music industry has taken this lack of evidence of a copy being made as proof that whenever there is a lack of evidence of anything, copies of CD's are being made. I know it doesn't make sense. Talk to the music industry about it. CD sales are down. They don't have any evidence that illegal copies are being made, so that means illegal copying must be rampant, because when copies are, in fact, being made, there is no evidence.
Because there's not actually anything missing, you've got to wonder how much damage piracy actually does to the music industry. Even if they knew exactly how many pirated copies of songs were floating around, it still wouldn't help. They can and do say, "We think there's a million copies of this song that haven't been paid for, and at $1.20 per copy, that costs the music industry $1.2 billion each year." This statement makes the assumption, however, that everyone who pirates a song would buy it if they couldn't pirate it. This just isn't the case.
I can quite easily see someone thinking a $25 CD just isn't worth that much, and copying it from someone else so it only costs them a 50 cent CD-R. If they didn't know anyone who had the CD, though, they still wouldn't go out and buy it, they'd just do without.
With situations like this, the pirater is getting music they haven't paid for, but the music industry isn't losing a thing, because it's not a sale they would have made if the song had not been copied. Legality aside, it could be - and has been - argued that this is in fact free publicity for the artist in question. Sure, they're not getting paid for the one pirated copy, but if a friend of the pirate who would pay for the album hears it, decides it's good music, and goes out and buys it, there's a sale the artist and record label wouldn't have got, had that music not been pirated in the first place.
Again, I'm not saying copying intellectual property isn't wrong....but it's not going to go away. There are some people who will simply not pay for music. But rather than spending all your time frantic about the lost sales to this unquantifiable beast called piracy, wouldn't it be much better for your reputation, as well as your stress level, to take advantage of what a few unauthorized copies of your music floating around out there could do for you?