Both the music industry and hollywood are doomed though, at least in their current forms. You cannot hope to maintain a closed system revolving around control of information in todays world.

I am someone who spent many years buying CD’s and DVD’s/VHS, but now I am someone who downloads the majority of my films and music for free.
I understand that it is wrong and I really don’t know why people on this site try to justify it.

So if it is wrong, why do I do it?

Well for many years as a kid, I couldn’t afford to buy music or films so I relied on the radio and the TV.
I used to record songs on the radio and record films on the TV.
When I started high school and I met friends with similar music tastes I was able to start copying their albums off them.
By the time I was 15 I had a huge collection of copied cassettes and a huge collection of recorded (from TV) films on VHS.

When CD’s started to become the norm, I was a college student and I had a part time job leaving me with a little money in my pocket.
Enough money to buy 1 or 2 CD’s a week which is exactly what I did.
Unfortunately, every week in HMV there were 4 or 5 new CD’s which I wanted to buy but simply couldn’t afford.
We had a system going by which my mates and I wouldn’t buy CD’s that one of us already owned, so that way between us we could own a lot more, rather than own several copies of the same CD.
We would then swap CD’s with each other and copy them, initially on to cassette and then on to CD’s when the technology became more readily available and affordable.

By the letter of the law we were committing a crime as we were copying CD’s, however, we were just college kids who could not afford to buy a lot of music and therefore just working together to obtain the music we wanted at an affordable price.
This is how the music industry has always worked, and the music industry was not losing out, it was actually benefiting from us.

If there were 10 of us and we bought 10 CD’s by different bands, it is still only the same amount of CD’s if we had each bought 1 copy of the same CD.
The fact was we didn’t have limitless money and we bought what we could afford.
The stuff we copied wasn’t lost sales because if we couldn’t have copied them, we still wouldn’t have been able to buy them.

As for films, I just used to record from the telly onto VHS and kept that copy in my collection.
Later on down the line, I was able to copy from the telly onto DVD, or from DVD to DVD and now I can copy directly to a hard drive.
In a similar manner to above, I also copy DVD’s from friends collections for the simple reason that I cannot afford to but every DVD that I want.

Now I am not saying that it makes it right to do what I do just because I couldn’t afford to buy everything I wanted, but what I am saying is that I have done this for years and years, long before the internet was about.
So why was there never such a big issue before about all of this?

This is where I think it is all about control.
When I recorded a film off the telly or copied a CD or DVD off a mate, I was left with a copy and in the 80’s and 90’s it was a poorer quality copy than the original. In more modern times when the copy was on par with the original I still didn’t have the proper packaging that came with it, so by all intents and purposes it was still an inferior copy than the original.

If I wanted a proper copy of the film or album, I had to buy it.

Nowadays I still do the same thing.
I have a mate in work who buys loads of CD’s still and rips them to his ipod, and I rip the contents of his ipod to my PC if he has any new albums I want.
I have (virtual) friends who are constantly sharing music and films via peer to peer networks.
The principals are the same as what I was doing in the 80’s and 90’s. I am getting a copy of a film or album off someone by taking a copy of their copy.

The only difference these days for the industry is that the copy I get is not inferior in any way at all.
It is an exact copy of the original and because the original is bought from itunes or another online retailer there is no packaging or physical artwork or booklets.
So in essence, I have the original of the product.

Whereas before in the 80’s and 90’s I would save up to buy the originals of the copies I loved, in this day and age to do that, I would be deleting a file from my PC and then paying for the exact same file to be put back on it.

So now the industries feel that they need to control what I pay for to stop this from happening.
But that means that they take all my freedom away from me with the product I buy.
When I bought a CD in the 90’s, I was free to play it in my bedroom, in the front room, in the car, at my mates, in work etc etc, but now I am being told that if I buy a CD I am limited as to where I can play it.
CD’s I bought 20 years ago can still be listened to today, but I already have songs from itunes that can’t be played on my PC because I have had over 5 new PC’s since I first bought the songs.

That lack of freedom does not sit well with me, and I suddenly realise that for the first time ever, the copy is actually superior than the original, because the copy gives me all the freedom that a CD did, but the original doesn’t have that anymore.

So how does the industry get round this?
I honestly do not know the answer, but what I do know is that trying to control what I have bought after I have paid for it is not the answer.
Once I have paid for it I expect it to be mine to play on all my PC’s and music systems even if I own 30 of each.

All I know is that in the 90’s I was copying CD’s and films left right and centre and it did not upset the industries at all.
They still sold millions every week even though copying was going on.
I honestly think that the two work hand in hand.
If the industry just concentrate on selling us value for money and putting more effort into bands with substance as opposed to 5 minute popstars, people will keep buying their products.
Yes copying (sharing) will go on like it always has done but the industry will not only survive but flourish as it always has done.

If they keep trying to control what we can do with the music and films we buy through DRM etc, then people will just not buy their products.

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http://knewthetruth.webs.com/

good riddance, adios, ciao!