[Long... possibly worth reading]
I do think that one of the difficulties with this whole area of debate (file sharing, ripping copyright mp3's etc) is that there are several different - although related - issues that get muddled together as if one simple opinion is equally relevant to all.
On Tuesday 11 Feb 2003 9:17 pm, MJ Ray wrote:
http://www.unisong.org/ http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ http://pkl.net/~node/ http://www.eff.org/cafe/resources.html etc etc ad inf
Well yes, it's great that there are many musicians who do give their music away but that is a different issue. Many professional musicians do not want to give their work away. It is arguable that they may be mistaken and that their earnings would increase if they did but nevertheless they do not give it away.
Now I don't want to be self-righteous here - like most people I have loads of home-made cassette and CD copies, for example, and if I had broadband I would quite probably d/load other stuff too. I also get involved with some trading of live concert recordings - not all by artists who are taper-friendly!
So - guilty as charged and I admit it. What does annoy me though is the claim by some heavy d/loaders of copyrighted non-free music that they are championing the artists because they (the artists) are being ripped-off by the music biz. I think that is self-justifying hypocrisy.
"To live outside the law you must be honest" (with yourself at least). Bob Dylan c.1969 - and it's still true.
So for example, a good friend of mine (co-incidentally the person who first encouraged me to use linux) spends a lot of his time coding while listening to d/loaded mp3s (i.e. not ripped from his own collection). Yes, he has certainly contributed to free s/w projects as well but he certainly expects to be paid for the commercial work that he does - that's his income.
So to me one of the key elements is choice: he chooses to give some of his work away but does not give other work away. Yet if someone took that commercial work and used it without permission then in my opinion he would be justified in feeling ripped-off. I'm assuming you can see the comparison I'm making here. He doesn't see it though :-)
Funny, it's the artistic freedom activists who seem to be decrying publishers to me. Oddly enough, the musicians in contract to the publishers are quiet about it. I wonder why?
I'm not being sarcastic here but I genuinely do not get the point you are making. My lack of understanding, sorry! Can you explain a little further?
Going back to the topic of download limits - I really do wonder what some people realistically expect for a few pence a day.
Let's just have some common sense here - it's a limited resource, there are contention ratios and if I was consistently getting slow rates because someone down the road insisted on hogging it to themselves I would be pretty p'ssed off with that person, not the ISP.
It's known as The Tragedy of the Commons (that's common land, before the Enclosures, not the palace of westminster BTW :-) Or, to put it another way, there's always a few and it takes all sorts to fuck up a beautiful planet.
Syd (now listening to a stealth-taped concert recording of Ray Charles 1995 :-)