las <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>What is the matter with the record companies?? Half of the music that
>is on Napster can't even be found anywhere!! It's not like you can go
>to Tower records and buy the CD.
I'd be willing to bet all the money to my name that 99% of the songs on
Napster are available at Tower, Virgin, or an online CD store.
>If you have no way of paying for something then how can it be
>stealing??? It's not stealing if there is no way to pay for it!!
Not true at all.
>The record industry has to realize that the whole world is changing.
>Hell, all someone has to do is make arrangements with someone in some
>country that does not honor US or international copyrights and charge
>5 cents a download. I don't see how you can stop someone from doing
>something like this when they are not bound by US law.
There are international copyright laws.
>If the person who started the internet had licensed the Web, he would
>be richer then Gates today. But I'm glad that he didn't. The internet
>is the last true democracy. All we need if the government sticking
>it's 2 cents into it and blanking the whole thing up.
Well, now that you mention it, some British company is now claiming that
they own the patent for hypertext links, and so everyone using links on
their web site now owes them a royalty ;-)
All that said, I think your idea about charging a modest fee for MP3
downloads is a good one, and one we'll see before too long.
>Maybe when Metallash!t has to keep canceling concerts because they
>can't sell enough tickets, they'll have a change of heart too!! They
>are got to be lower then pond scum. Even lower then lawyers!!! (if
>you can get that low!!). They are suing their fans!!!! This has got
>to be a first.
I don't get this. A band is upset that people are stealing their music,
they try to shut down the company making such theft possible, and that
makes them "lower than pond scum?" They *aren't* suing their fans. They
are going after Napster.
As for the *real* issues behind the Napster case, I don't buy the "I'm
just downloading music I already have" argument, since on most computers
nowadays, with anything slower than a T1, it's faster to rip the songs
off your own CDs than it is to download a 4-6 MB MP3. The major use for
Napster is to download songs that people don't have.
The other argument made frequently is that downloading songs lets you
"try them out" and that if you like them you'll go buy the CD. 1) Even if
that were true, that doesn't make it legal, and it's still up to the
record companies and artists as to whether they want to allow it. 2) The
single study that claims that this *is* true was severely
methodologically flawed, so there is still no evidence that this theory
is accurate.
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