Conquer Club

Is it just me, or has the copyright crowd missed the target with this current commercial.

According to them, buying a genuine Disney DVD for £10-15 with un skip able trailers and Piracy is a crime adverts, as opposed to the pirate copy for £3 with all this stuff removed is the better thing to do.

Where do you stand on Pirated CD's, DVD's etc.

I love that advert it makes piracy glamourous.

My stance on piracy is if you don't want it to get pirated, take precautions against it. It's not like there isn't technology to make the stuff degrade if copied/redistributed.

Most of the crap regarding "ooh it's stolen" is stupid, the adverts should be at the producers, and should be more like this campaign:

Hmmm, difficult one.

Because I'm too lazy to type out my opinion in full and detailed essay form, here's a quick summary:

The alleged problem: Piracy. Yeah it's bad. We all love doing it, but we know that it's a breach of intellectual property rights of the author, we know it denies them/companies profits, and we realise that it's wrong.

The Actual Problem: Music companies have been using the fact that intellectual property rights are essentially state-sponsored micro-monopolies to build a cartel situation in which they control supply and have inflated the price of (an arguably societaly necessary commodity) to supernormal levels, leading to them making profits which they don't really deserve. Essentially, the fact that they can get a legalised monopoly has led to a market where free-trade is distorted, and talentless idiots are raking in millions and millions of dollars.

Solution: Neither full-blown piracy and looting is right, nor is the old market position. Allowing either practice to continue unchecked is unfair on either consumers or producers. As such there needs to be some sort of middle-ground found where IP rights aren't able to be used to prop up what is clearly a cartel, where consumers aren't given no option other than paying grossly inflated prices for music, but where artists and distributors are paid a fair cut too.

Implementation: So how do we get there? No idea.
New distribution models (See: Prince, Radiohead, etc) aren't going to go largescale anytime soon because they'd lead to a huge fall in record company profits if everybody was doing it (not just the odd opportunists), so companys aren't going to go for that. Neither are companies going to admit that a change in IP regimes would be fair, as it's far more convenient for them to bang on about current regimes, and insist that they are given their cartel back immediately. On the other hand, even if a fair option was miraculously created and offered, large numbers of people wouldn't stop pirating, because it would still be free (and massively favourable to them).

Conclusion: In my opinion it's 'third way' O'clock for the music industry (and consumers) as a whole. Otherwise the whole market is bound to return to, or remain in, an unfair state.

But 'Knock off Nigel' and 'You wouldnt steal a car'... those adverts are both patronising and lame. Fire all those responsible, then feed them to dogs.

The major music label's continued existence provides no benefit to musicians or consumers.

I think pay as you like is the only justifiable solution, at least as far as music is concerned.

I was in a cinema the other day... and the "You wouldn't steal a car" advert came on...

And with perfect timing some random bloke shouted "I would if I could download it!".

Genius!!

C.

yeti_c wrote:I was in a cinema the other day... and the "You wouldn't steal a car" advert came on...

And with perfect timing some random bloke shouted "I would if I could download it!".

Oh, good man!

The wittiest anybody in my local cinema has managed so far is "f*ck off you twats!" and "Bruv, dis shit is fucking long.".


Conclusion: DM needs to save pennies in a jar until he can afford to stop living in a slum, and until he can afford to pay for music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-PemhvXHc

watch it's funny.

Dancing Mustard wrote:

yeti_c wrote:I was in a cinema the other day... and the "You wouldn't steal a car" advert came on...

And with perfect timing some random bloke shouted "I would if I could download it!".

Oh, good man!

The wittiest anybody in my local cinema has managed so far is "f*ck off you twats!" and "Bruv, dis shit is fucking long.".

They ran similar ads in the cinemas here, too, but stopped after realizing that it hurt their business to tell their paying customers not to "steal" their movies.



I basically agree with DM, copyrights and IP rights, especially for art and entertainment as they are currently implemented are a joke, I think it's 70 years until after the author's death for books and a similar timespan for movies (though not tied to any specific person but to the work itself). Not sure exactly when music stops being subject to IP since it's still "stealing" to download a recording of a symphonic orchestra performing Bach's Brandenburg Concertos for example. And old J.S. died a very long time ago.
I'm quite happy paying money to the people who write and perform the music I like listening to, though I'm not sure 15-20€/hour is a fair wage from the "employer's" (mine) POV. Especially since it's packaged on a disc that costs less than half a cent to produce and comes in a pretty flimsy box with what is mostly only mediocre visual artwork.
What I'm not at all happy with is people telling me what to do or not to do with that disc once I have paid for and acquired it. "The only way in which you may use this object you just bought and is now your property is by inserting it into what we deem an appropriate device and listening to/watching the content." I don't let the company I buy my furniture from tell me where to place it. Why should you tell me what to do and not to do with this piece of plastic? It recently became illegal here to create a backup copy of any music or movie you buy, you may still own a backup copy for personal use, but you may not create one. Where's the logic in that?

I'm also well aware that free downloads for everyone will not work, it would remove practically all incentive to produce music or movies, and that's not a situation anyone desires to see.