Jericho wrote
I'm not going to quote and unquote cause I'll be on here whole day so I'll try to cover most points here:
Firstly, as I have already stated, just because something costs a lot of money does not make it valuable. Yes, it costs money to make music but that does not immediately make that music valuable. Also, I made it very clear that I was referring to digital music. A digital copy, ONCE MADE, has very little reproduction cost. It is in fact zero. You right click and copy and like that you have another copy. If that is the case, the only costs to be recovered then are the costs of making that initial copy. Charging a fixed price for something that subsequently has a zero cost is a rip off.
It doesn't have a zero cost. The recording costs money - this is unavoidable. The copies cost very little, but that is not the same as zero. You need to own hardware to make copies. And it costs money and time and sweat to make the recording that you are going to copy.
It ALWAYS costs somebody money to make the files that we think we are entitled to download for free.
Value is a different matter. Value is at least partly perceived. Justin Bieber CDs have no value to me in some respects because I have no interest in his music. However if we play the subjective games about what things mean to us then we can make anything worth as much as is convenient for us at the time. There needs to be a better, more concrete way of addressing this. I know that it cost somebody money to make Justin Bieber's CDs. Saying that it has no value to me therefore it has no absolute value is self-serving and false. I personally am not going to pay money for his CDs, MP3s etc but that doesn't mean they have no value.
Principles should apply as well. If I say Bieber's recordings have no value then the same should apply to my own recordings, if I have any to publish, as well as to recordings of the artists whose work I do cherish. Hmmmm.... maybe it's better, at least the lesser of evils, to say that the same value I see in the recordings that I own or cherish should be given to Bieber's recordings as well.
And you know, the thing that bugs me most about this whole argument is that we are having the presumption to make the decision that the artist or the owner of the recording should be making. It's not ours to give away. We can decline to buy it if it's not attractive to us, if we think that it's injurious to society or a not in the public interest we might even campaign to get it banned or to have it's sales restricted, but it's not for us to say "hey! That should be given away and so anybody can take it for free."
Secondly, no one deserves to get paid. You provide value and you get rewarded. Water is freely available yet people sitll pay for bottled water. It is no different to the tap water but it satifies peoples need. It is convenient and is available when people need it. Coca Cola does not deserve to get paid because they bottled the water. They get paid because they have provided something that is convenient and valuable. If you go and make an album, you don't deserve to get paid. You need to give me a reason to buy. And the fact that you spent money does not mean I should pay for it.
Well just because you want something doesn't mean that you don't have to pay for it. The proposition is this: I have a CD that I have made, and I think it is worth X rand. If you don't like it, then don't have anything to do with it. If you think it's OK but overpriced then state that you'll buy it at a lower price and decline to buy it until it's at a price that you deem fair. Just helping yourself, without having the decency to ask the owner, is not on.
Thirdly, the CD as a format is dying. This is fact. You can go to Musica and see people buying CDs but look up the number of CDs sold in the last 10 years. It is free falling.
Sure. But so what?
I will go back to my original point. Digital music is not scarce. It is not expensive to reproduce. One can even argue (and is shown by a lot of people having home studios), music is no longer that expensive to produce. All of this means that the price of music has to come down. Pricing it significantly above its real cost overvalues it and creates a market for piracy.
Irrelevant. Nothing that you buy is sold at the cost of it's constituent products.
Oh, and file sharing is NOT stealing. If I have a file and I share it with singemonkey, I still have my file. If someone steals my car, I no longer have it. These two actions are not the same.
Singemonkey has something that he should have paid for and paid nothing for it - and without the owner's consent. If the owner says "go ahead and make as many copies as you want and give them to whoever you want by any medium you like" then OK. If the owner says "You can pay for this track for your own use but you cannot redistribute because that hurts my profits" then that's a very different matter.
I think the way to solve this puzzle is to start from the beginning. How does the recording happen. How much does that cost? Who owns the various copyrights and work forwards from there. Starting from the end, working backwards and eliminating whatever is not convenient is never valid or conclusive.
