Death to iTunes

I'll give you YouTube. Not the VCR.

If you record something off HBO instead of buying it in a store, you're stealing. If you buy it for $0.09, you're paying the Russian mob to steal it for you. It's all stealing.

With YouTube, you don't ever have a hard copy of the video. So, you're just stealing it long enough for you to watch it.

With a VCR, or recordable DVDs which haven't caught on like VCRs did, you have a hard copy that is yours.

 

If you want to have a real conversation about the silliness of copyright laws as currently written, go ahead.

If you don't feel bad about pirating music, I understand.

But the crimes against logic this thread is perpetrating are just not acceptable.

 

The Bieber one was a joke. I apologize for not using blue font.

 

That's the least of your crimes.

1) The fact that intellectual property owners have a history of vigorously defending their interests, even to points that seem absurd after the fact, is not evidence that any complaint they make is automatically invalid.

2) The fact that you haven't read a magazine article about some sleazy website you found isn't evidence that it's not really illegal.

3) Recording something freely broadcast into your home by the rightful owner is not "stealing" in any sense of the world. Even beyond the fact that no copyright piracy is stealing, it's not even copyright infringement. It has little to nothing to do with this subject.

4) The fundamental difference between Youtube and the sites that you've chosen to patronize is that Youtube will honor any legal request by the rightsholder to remove content.


I don't care if you don't feel bad about pirating content. Goodness knows I've taken my fair share and don't feel a bit bad. I think there's a very interesting case to be made about the flaws of intellectual property laws in this country, and even with the entire concept of intellectual property. But you aren't making that case, you are just flailing around with stoner logic.

 

There are plenty of other legal music downloading services (EMusic - no Justin Bieber there - and Amazon immediately leap to mind, I'm sure there are others people savvier/less lazy than I are familiar with) if you don't like ITunes. For lots of reasons - mainly MP3 quality and difficulty in listening on non-ITunes devices - I don't.

There are also a lot of artists who're bypassing record companies by selling their stuff direct through legal download services - including ITunes. It's not like every .99 cents you spend there goes into Giant Record Behemoth's pocket. It's no longer entirely a Little Guy vs. Big Soulless Company debate, since more artists are using the Internet now. If you pirate a Radiohead album that you could've just bought straight from Radiohead's site, you actually are directly denying money to Radiohead.

Or you could just download over torrent or whatever the latest illicit filesharing org is, which is free/not mob. I'm not going to go all moralist about pirating music. I did a lot of it college. I don't anymore for various reasons. But there are lots of legal alternatives to the Steven Jobs juggernaut that don't require piracy/mob.

 

Wow, dudes on a board for journalists gleefully seeking to pay below market value for someone else's art. How very gauche.

Plus whatever the mob grabs from your account to help fund the World Cup preparations.

 

1. I'm not saying its invalid.

2. I'm not saying it's legal. I even shared the link where I finally found something, other than message boards, saying it was illegal.

3. Disney really doesn't care that I record My Little Mermaid to my DVR then burn it to a DVD instead of giving them a $19.95 for a copy? I'm just saying, I didn't think that it was stoner logic, but I just thought at the law's essence, I took something that was theirs and made it mine. I stole it.

4. I don't argue the sites doing the right or wrong thing. What I was trying to argue, evidently poorly, was the user.

 

Here's the problem with that Russian mob site - and this is coming from a good friend who uses it.
Some songs you download aren't the songs the site says they are. You look for a certain version of a song and you might not get it, so you try another version, and another, and another until you get it.
The other thing you have to worry about - especially with a crime syndicate - is having credit card info stolen.

 

My beef isn't with Jobs directly. I really just fall somewhere in the middle.

I easily spend in upwards of $500 a year going to concerts. I buy the overpriced tickets, tshirts, drinks. And I buy a lot of music because the folks I listen to aren't popular enough to be on these sites, or I'll buy live performances after the concerts.

I'm gonna get out buying songs when I can whether somebody burns me a CD or I pump money a dime at a time into the USSR.

Maybe it's my warped way of justifying it to myself that I give them enough money.

But it does irk me that people get our creativeness for free as if we're public servants without the government retirement/benefits. Their creativeness is protected by all costs. (And trust me, I completely understand that their creativeness is run by people with far more business savy than our profession.)

At the end of the day, what set me off was "Russian Mob." It just rubbed me the way that those commercials that claim if you smoke weed, you're giving money to bin Laden.

And my friends and I aren't stupid enough to buy anything off the internet with credit card site that isn't Amazon or ebay or crap like that: $25 Visa gift card, load the account, purchase away.

 

I thought these guys just sang songs. Didn't realize they were that deep into the merchandising game, too.

 

You know, the tone and discussion of this thread took a turn that I don't think it was intended to take.

 

Whether to use iTunes to the Russian mob. I'll agree.