EITC?

Yes but you have to qualify for those so the don't count.

The point is that the bank robber analogy is a very poor one in this case..
I don't know any bank robbers but I don't see them as being potential customers, otherwise they wouldn't need to rob a bank.

Back on topic....

My kids pointed out to me last night that illegal downloads are now redundant anyway as they consume most of their free music from YouTube.

When i was a kid... 16, 17, 18 years old, and i liked a band, i used to go down to best buy, or wal mart or wherever - and buy their CD.

I still have many of those CDs in near perfect condition. but thats it... i cant remember the last time i walked into a store and purchased a CD, and other than an impulse buy of some romantic music with my wife or something in the check out lane - i havnt purchased a CD in probably 10 years or more.

the reason behind it?

there are several.

for starters take a look at ipods. you no longer have to buy a whole album with 20 songs on it just so you can listen to the same three favorites over and over again - with itunes for example, you can just nab any individual song for 99 cents.

another great music source is youtube. in the mood for a specific song? just search it on youtube, chances are it is uploaded there. Sure youtube may remove the video, but it will be right back up tomorrow. :88)

Pandora Internet Radio... it costs nothing and you can listen to music all day long, 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year.

In the history of recorded music there have been hundreds of format changes as technology comes along to allow for better listening or recording etc.

in my lifetime alone we have gone from vinyl records, to 8-tracks, to cassette tapes, to CDs, to mp3s to ipods etc... now my phone has more physical memory available just for the purpose of holding songs than my computer did just 5 or 6 years ago. I have argued that the 70s through today have been among the most interesting times to grow up and live in because things are advancing so fast its almost like being in a time machine :haha: i mean, there are kids today who are 20 years old and have never seen a vinyl record in action - let alone used one or went to the store on a mission to BUY one.:)

one interesting thing now is we are undergoing not only a change in format to digital music - with the various file types etc... but accessibility to music has changed drastically in the past decade.

children are alive today, who will grow up to find it ludicrous that people once actually had to physically go to a store to get the music they wanted to hear.

i dont think piracy is the problem


i think that the industry itself - despite its best efforts - has not been able to grow and adapt as fast as the technology - the format changes - and the accessibility to music has been able to grow and change over a relatively short time span.

when we went from 8 track tapes to cassette tapes not a great deal changed... sure, cassettes were smaller and more portable than 8-tracks, and yes... the cassettes held more music but on the whole, it wasn't really a major leap in technology.

it wasnt a major leap at all, it was a baby step.

in fact all the format changes have been baby steps... until recently.

the baby steps the music industry has been taking since the first recordings have been the norm, but now... the baby is expected to take huge sprawling giant strides.

I would stay away from any positive affirmations of having personally done things which are illegal in the US (also including stuff like drugs, prostitution, etc). Don't ask don't tell is the policy.

Btw have to say Platapus, your bank robber thing is a poor strawman argument.

Don't worry about infractions they dont hurt, I was expecting electic shocks or something. But nothing. Punishment today is too PC. :D

Who needs to pirate music when you have youtube, you not only get the music for free but even a video on your favourite band performing!

I grew up in the vinyl album era, and am a dedicated completist. If I like somebody I have to have everything they did, good and bad. Since I discovered a couple of quality pay-for-download sites I have been collecting all the stuff I've always loved but could never afford, all the stuff I thought I might like to have someday, and stuff I'd never dreamed of owning but now do.

It's scary.

Become a big corporation?:D

It was only meant to amuse. I think any discussion on why an illegal activitiy is ok is silly. :D

And how exactly is youtube not piracy? The answer: youtube is just as much piracy as any torrent site, rapidshare or other file sharing system. If you watch a youtube vid the music is downloaded to your PC every bit as much as when you download the album at rapidshare.

To continue with the "bank robbing" analogy, if downloading an mp3 file is like robbing a bank, watching a youtube vid is like robbing a bank, spending some of the stolen money and then dropping the rest in the sewer. Some bankrobbers are not afraid of poo and go the extra mile to recover the money and keep it. Most bankrobbers hate poo though and will just rob the bank again when they need more money.
Even if you "leave the money in the sewer" by not saving or recovering the youtube vid (both are actually quite easy) you're still "stealing" music from the artists by downloading a song to your PC without paying for it.

Also, if you're so much against music piracy, why do you participate in it by being active in the Subsim Music Thread?



I don't think those are really good rules, as this is a pretty international community and you can't expect all members to know the US law. Especially since there are some major differences between the US' and other countries' law. For example, both drugs and prostitution are legal here in the Netherlands (and drugs are widely used and socially accepted, there's not a single friend of mine who doesn't smoke some weed every once in a while)

IMO it would be much better to define what exactly is illegal in the Subsim rules than to let it depend on US law.

in that case I'd might want to edit some of my old posts:88)

Where did I say it wasn't. You also appear to be ignoring the massive amount of officially released material on YouTube. Not that this isn't dwarfed by the amount "illegal" stuff. You are quite correct that the content is downloaded, however there is a perceived difference between downloading files and browsing which was my point. I don't see the point in splitting hairs though.

This straw man makes even less sense than Platapus', particularly if the artist themselves has posted the video of their own material, to which they hold the rights. The problem with YouTube for the end consumer is that it is hard to tell what the source of the vid is unless you only go to an known artists channel of course.

Who said I was against it? I only said that both forms of stealing are not right and in the eyes of the laws of most countries around the world both activites are on the wrong side. I participate there because I enjoy it of course.:D

We generally have, but we cannot specify everything (we don't spell out stuff like music piracy, or drugs as they are rarely discussed here). It's also not like we are applying every possible US law, only the big stuff which most people know. Most of it is also common sense in dealing with certain hot topics. We use US law as a reference as that is where the servers are based (and where liability lies), and because they are fairly conservative in nature.

Basically, what it boils down to is that we don't want to know the intimate details. Like for example why you like 'spending time' with prostitutes, or where you think the best places are to inject heroin. Those would be considered inappropriate topics.

Also if it is an area that is not explicitly spelled out, we often will drop lots of hints and even direct warnings first.

I think music piracy is a reaction to a bad business model. Ipods can hold 30,000 songs. at $1.00 who has the money to buy all that music?