– Never Pirate Games -

But I’ve been thinking about how to make my response a little better, and here’s a point that was lurking in my mind but completely unrelated to your response to my post.

I think my definition of “the industry” is skewed – I don’t take musicians to be part of the industry nearly as much as, say, game developers in the game industry. But that’s only because I have a skewed mind – I believe the industry is everybody that’s in it for the money.

I think the MAFIAA (yeah, I’m talking both the Music and Film Industry Association of America and the Members Against Freedom of Information Association of America) is going in completely the wrong direction with their advertising against piracy, and you bring up why they are.

You bring up a very strong point that it’s not just the musicians who suffer from piracy, but also the people in the industry itself – but, I’d have to amend this to say that it’s not the musicians who suffer, but mainly the industry people. Like I explained before, I don’t count musicians as part of the industry because they’re not in it chiefly for the money. (If they are, tell me.) So the claim that “musicians won’t make music if you keep on pirating” is false. They may stop distributing it as widely because the industry people are losing their money, but I don’t think there’s any major example of a musician that refused to keep on making music because his sales were being hurt.

So if you want to get the real message across of why piracy hurts the music industry, you need to stop citing musicians as a principal victim. Musicians don’t suffer because of piracy – the industry does.

it’s a shame they have no right to be angry when they have signed away all of their rights to everything they have created as a band [and the sale and distribution thereof] to their record label / distributor etc for the benefit of being publicised and making a royalty, with this kind of set up surely it is possible for the artist them self to be punished for burning his own music and giving it to a friend?

i know a few small artists none of them are rich, most of them have quite a few fans [relatively ;)], all of them are just happy to make music

how many people that you know, your self included, legally own enough music to fill up your mp3 player?

things just aren’t right :(

Everyone has a product or service they sell for their living. You probably do, too. To make payment only at the discretion of the taker of goods and services, we’d also require a workable paradigm for everyone, and good reason why this is better. Pirates didn’t target the arts because of some grand free speech free information ideology, Mr. Briggs. Pirates targeted digital merchandise simply because it became large-scale possible. If cars could be cloned we’d be hearing the same specious justifications. We all know this is very true.

But this movement gathers none of the respect of the American revolution because it is not across the board nor conceived in courage; it is narrowly contained to digital only where theft is quick and easy and secrecy is the way.

We can also likely agree that more and more product and service will move to digital in time. When a thoughtful and irrefutable explanation can be advanced why only digital product and service–but not anything else– should suffer this institutionalized gutting of fairearned revenue while the damage to the families is perhaps sad but still proper, respect will follow. Until then pirates are just old fashioned crooks with a technical assist in a new exciting medium, and a just culture will do what it must.

If you’re not popular because you basically suck, FIX YOUR SOUND before blaming others for your problems.