Question re: filesharing

[one eyed jack]

Thanks gents. Always good to hear the thoughts of others.

[Dave Wells]

I agree but it won't work and can't be policed.

[Ogre]

I don't know about pornography, but with music this is very very far from the truth with a bold statement like that, with little else to justify it except availability and plummeting sales. The only reason people and the music industry claim filesharing has skyrocketed piracy is because at least you can make rough estimates regarding bandwidth usage, torrent site etc. bandwidth, and so on.

Truth is, in the 80's and early 90's, you couldn't really estimate the cost of piracy. I don't know how many people in this forum were teenagers at the time, but there's little difference in downloading an album of music and copying it with a cassette recorder.

Same applies to some video products too. Dual VCR ownage wasn't that common though, but at least around here you pretty much had people making some money out of that too. Not saying any of this is "morally" ok, but the point is piracy was/is/will be. The only thing that changes is the medium.

With pornography, I'd assume it's still the social stigma attached to it. If one could go buy pornography from the local store without anyone giving a second look at you for doing so, perhaps people wouldn't be so hasty in downloading it. Then again like someone said, porn can flourish through content you can't get in a downloaded or pirated package.

Besides when it comes to music, old music was more than music, it was a work of art. When one bought vinyl, you got the art that came with it, the package alone was worth owning it. Now you get shit in a disc, with little to justify buying it. Besides, as I've pretty much listened to punk and metal for two decades now, as a consumer I'm expected to buy records that I have no idea what they really contain. When I open the radio, I hear the same fucking rnb song once an hour. Not to dig at rnb, but buying music these days is like buying used cars without seeing or testing them.

Secretease wrote:

> My house is in order, my site does what it says.
>
> The point is that piracy/theft has rocketed thanks to the
> filesharing. People don't see it as stealing. Before
> filesharing etc if you wanted a bootleg or copy of a film it
> was under the counter type. Now everyone can do it.
>
>

[Secretease]

Well, I know a band who toured and promoted extremely hard before releasing their first CD. When it was released it sold around 1000 copies. One of the members checked a torrent site and found it had been downloaded around 8000 times. He's not daft enough to think that all those people would've paid for it - try before you buy etc - but 1000 sales to 8000 downloads. It's not rocket science to see they lost out on some much needed money. Maybe it can be written off when you're established - but it sure makes getting started alot harder.

[one eyed jack]

I agree but it won't work and can't be policed.

Dave I already know that. What did I say at the beginning????

Humour me.

So would you feel psychological traumatised if the file sharing ceased to exist?

[one eyed jack]

I think a lot of artists decide to do away with the headache and give it away for free as recently demonstrated with various artistes.

Probably why live shows are selling out faster than they used to.

In the case of porn, probably explains why parties are on the increase and more poppular in attendance to.

Which brings me to another point....Why is the BGAFD allowing posts for these kinds of parties but the mention of escorting is a no no?

[Ned]

I wouldn't feel "traumatised" but a lot of people who produce material (music especially) would, when those who download to sort the good stuff from the shite stop buying anything at all.

I've downloaded music and bought what I liked afterwards. The rest gets dumped. I've downloaded films or rented and ripped them, then bought the originals later. I've dumped about 300 burned DVDs in the last year because I now have the original material on a nice, shiny, factory pressed DVD and no longer have any copies in the house.

What do I never buy thesedays? Porn.

I don't belong to a site, don't buy DVDs any more (not even at bargain prices) and funnily enough I don't download it any more either. I'm bored with porn really and it was always massively overpriced anyway at ?20 for a DVD.

At the end of the day, speaking for myself, if something is really good I will buy it. But I won't buy it "blind" if it is new music.

DVDs are and were different. Most of my DVD downloading was done because I simply couldn't afford to spend ?40 on a boxed set, but as soon as these things hit the sales, and DVDs become stupidly cheap very quickly thesedays )perhaps because of downloading and a realisation that prices are far too high), I would buy them.

[mrchapel]

Fuck! Who was it recently did that? I think it was Radiohead released their last album to download free online and you donated what you felt was a fair price and they did fairly well with people paying about right quid on average.

And one way to get rid of piracy is, well its a good idea if legit music has no restrictions. Like when I buy a fucking music track on itunes I`m not paying a quid a song to have bad language beeped out or for the song only to work on one computer, I don`t get that shit with a cd. It also doesn`t work when you plug your ipod into your xbox to find it doesn`t recognise music purchased off itunes.

[Dick Moby]

Last year I gave away hundreds of video tapes. Some still had the wrapping on them. Given the age of these tapes I would expect most of them to have been shown on tv. Most people now own a dvd recorder so would you class recording a film off the tv piracy ? Do you think it's fair to have to buy a film twice just because the media changes ?

[Ogre]

That's what I mean about the visibility of it, though there is much truth in "less established" acts taking a bigger hit. Before the internet, the damage would have been done in tape trading/copying. I don't know to what extent it would compare to p2p these days, but surely it would have been very significant aswell.

Secretease wrote:

> Well, I know a band who toured and promoted extremely hard
> before releasing their first CD. When it was released it sold
> around 1000 copies. One of the members checked a torrent site
> and found it had been downloaded around 8000 times. He's not
> daft enough to think that all those people would've paid for it
> - try before you buy etc - but 1000 sales to 8000 downloads.
> It's not rocket science to see they lost out on some much
> needed money. Maybe it can be written off when you're
> established - but it sure makes getting started alot harder.
>
>