Anyway, as a commenter pointed out, TV shows are the most interesting thing for many, while the record labels are the ones, spearheaded with RIAA, that make the most noise about their rights being violated.

I think everyone should have access to all music ever made. It’s our culture. It belongs to us. Must not be controlled by evil corporations! This should be a basic human right…

“crap not good enough”

You need better crap?

“how do I smell 128kbps cbr mp3 only”

I can smell that too. I won’t be on board with anything like this unless it is CD quality.

I’m always LiT either by bud or hash..And my costs are more like $150/Month after thinking about it. All the money I pay are for LEGALL services and it’s up to me what I do with that service. I didn;t say that P2P is legit but taxing it would give it a ‘sense’ of legallity(sp?) that would be hard to challenge in a court of law. They would make their profit..I would get my media…it’s a win-win situation.

The appeal of P2P tends to outweigh a lot of the negative risks that are attached to such a protocol as bit torrent and the use of it. People know this, understand this and consequently exploit this. People love P2P because of how readily the majority of content is available to them and how quickly it can be obtained. An example, its 18:00 and you want the new, Killers album for argument sake. Depending on the connection you have, it is a safe bet that by 18:10 you have that album on your hard drive, in a format that isn’t restricted in any way. That’s the appeal. Yes it is a form of online theft in as much as if you went into a shop, you would pay for a physical copy of the same item, but i just wanted to generally emphasise the appeal of P2P.

This is what the entertainment sector needs to realise and ultimately utilise in such a way so that they can obtain revenue from this kind of service that an ISP could provide their costumers.

Virgin Media come up with the right idea, going in the right direction and essentially doing their bit as a responsible ISP to try and find an ‘appealing’ alternative to P2P and the doubts from the big cheeses come steadily flowing in. Not like i am that surprised as this always seems to happen when someone comes up with a positive idea to help resolve an ongoing and complicated issue, in this case, unauthorised file sharing.

It does all come down to money for the entertainment sector and not the ‘much publicised’ issue of new artists struggling to make it in the music industry. It obviously comes down to the money because for the longest time the sector have been throwing figures at us pertaining to ‘supposed’ lost revenue due to the prevelance of P2P filesharing and have been banging down the doors of governments to introduce new legislations which would deter people from using P2P and yet when an idea is placed before them to help curb the number of people who engage in this activity, they suddenly decide after all that the issue of filesharing isn’t that important to them when it goes head to head with the issue of lost commercial and financial gain.

Yes, people would consume all they could for their monthly subscription fee but, lets admit it, who wouldn’t? It was even initially announced by Virgin Media to be an ‘All You Can Eat’ service.

I would happily pay £15 per month to obtain music via an unlimited service such as this from VM. I am a customer of VM and applaud the forethought they have shown their actions to help deter people from using P2P applications as a way of obtaining digital music.

The bigger issue to me is the point i made at the top of this post. The entertainment sector need to start realising that people want digital content when they want it and make money from music and film this way by supporting services which encourage people to turn away from P2P whilst not limiting their options of what content they want to obtain online. Shifting gears to movies for a minute; people don’t like to be told anymore when they can see a film and where they have to go to see it if it is available on the internet already. Yes, a pre release of a movie on the internet will only arrive there via dubious circumstances but this is essentially the message that the P2P faithful are trying to get across. To the entertainment sector it just appears like those people are a bunch of ‘freeloaders who think nothing has a value anymore if it is available online and therefore they can just take it’. It runs deeper than this. To me, people who use P2P also are saying “This is the modern age, this is 2009, we can do almost everything online these days and so why can’t we see the films we want and listen to the music we want when we want to?”
Its a case of the big companies still wanting to control what you see and hear when they give you permission to and the fact that the entertainment sector are rapidly losing grip on maintaining these age old ways of distributing content in this digital era, they are starting to be more aggressive in their attempts to ‘stomp out’
unauthorised file sharing.

I read something afew months ago which has stuck in my mind ever since. “When you have millions of people ‘breaking the law’ it is the law that obviously needs changing, not the people” I agree with this as i find it hard to believe there are millions of thieves roaming the internet. Instead you have millions of disgruntled people who actually live in the modern age and feel that companies really need to use the internet more wisely to sell their product in this age.

I strongly agree that the creators of the products we enjoy so much should be paid for their work and i for one would welcome a service like the one that is being proposed as it will give revenue to those creators but in reality, until all the bodies and companies agree to such a service and the same in the future with film companies, i can’t see a way that illegal filesharing is going to be stopped, without turning all the fans of music and film against those very people who are creating them. If that happened, the suffered financial loss i believe would be a great deal larger than it is now due to online filesharing.

What makes me laugh is that even some musicians are hitting out at the government and record companies regarding their attempts to stem online filesharing. These are the very people who would be victims of illicit filesharing and yet they are on the side of the file sharer themselves? That speaks volumes to me.

Virgin Media = double thumbs up for the initiative

Entertainment sector companies who are against this proposed service from Virgin Media = make up your minds and either embrace this kind of change or face losing more revenue as a result of filesharing.

Thanks for reading

Dave
UK

But paying $1200 a year to download copyright material via Newsgroups/Usenet etc is stupid. Your still in breach of copyright -and you can still get caught.

It is NOT legit

Who?
E.M.I.

Too many people had the suss
Too many people support us
An unlimited amount
Too many outlets in and out

Who?
EMI goodbye

Sir and friends are crucified
A day they wished that we had died
We are an addition
We are ruled by-none, never

And you thought that we were faking
That we were all just money making
You do not believe we’re for real
Or you would lose your cheap appeal?

Why don’t judge a book just by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
of stupid fools who stand in line

Like EMI

Unlimited edition
With an unlimited supply
That was the only reason
We all had to say goodbye

Unlimited supply
EMI
And there is no reason why
EMI
I tell you if was all a frame
EMI
They only did it ‘cos of fame
EMI

And I do not need the pressure
EMI
I can’t stand the useless fools
EMI
Unlimited supply
EMI
Hallo EMI
EMI
Goodbye A & M

– Rotten, Johnny; Jones, Steve; Matlock, Glen; Cook, Paul;

“According to a later account by Jones, both he and Cook played on instruments they had stolen.”

January 1977: EMI drops The Sex Pistols

March 1977: A & M drops The Sex Pistols

May 1977: The Sex Pistols signed with Virgin Records

Nice that at least some record labels do not try the “control”-attempt.

The others are just too jealous and greedy to offer DRM free music at a flat rate.

“Can I have that in FLAC please…. or do I still need to be a pirate to get decent quality round here?”

so?

Jamendo is a great start to get rid of ridiculous licenses.

Best of luck to them. A good thing is if they get greedy and stupid, then people can simply fall back to unauthorised means. :-*

Loyal customers will probably have to pay £20 per month and new customers, £5 for 3 months, then £10 thereafter.

Virgin always treat their most loyal customers like crap!

Not only do they have disdain for their most loyal customers but they shipped many jobs overseas.

Knowing Virgin Media…

I think I’ll opt for the non-virgin solution to obtain my music and it means I can miss out the mainstream cheesy trash that isn’t worth listening to and subsequently promoting, anyway.

Money well saved! ;]

“it is vital for the labels to innovate and compete with piracy.”

thats just what we ask for, isn’t it ?

and lets hope this hurts the sony bastards..

“An insider at Universal doesn’t think that the worries expressed by EMI and Sony Music are justified, as customers with unlimited access will only download a few dozen tracks per month”

ummmmm when they specify UNLIMITED… that means ALOT more that a few dozen tracks/month (i would try it for £15/month but im gonna stop downloading when my 1T hdd is full) … doing it for the lulz >:)

Have something against p2pnet and Canadians? FWIW I pay $45 per month for my ADSL and don’t subscribe to any online services. The only sad thing about it is the reason my ISP doesn’t need to throttle traffic using DPI; their upload speeds suck! Still it is better than Shaw whom I hate with a passion and does use DPI. Thankfully it will all change soon as my ISP is planning to invest in fiber.

#58 (Zoness) said: “If this service can offer obscure foreign music, a variety of format choices and bitrates and no DRM then they would have me!”

Why bother with a bunch of different formats and bitrates when only one is needed? Letting the downloaders covert high quality lossless files to a format and bitrate of their own choosing makes the most sense to me. Since there is no DRM it shouldn’t be an issue and probably requires less storage overall on the part of Virgin/Universal. Likely less of a headache for them to maintain as well. Whatever maximizes profits is the route they’ll most likely take if their like… um, smart. /rolleyes

“I’m honest enough to delete my library of their music if I quit using the service”

No offense meant, but that’s not being honest – that being stupid. You have paid for that – why in the world should you delete anything?

@32:

This Magnatune.com site is actually not a good one since they point out that if you share music with more than 3 of your friends, you should feel guilty. So if you have 4 best friends, they would like you to feel guilty for not ruining a relationship with your friend and actually giving him a copy.

It takes a lot of effort and time to change how the public thinks about this or that – collective mind is very slow to change. Copying files should be considered legitimate, legal and ethical. This site, unfortunately, asks you to consider file copying a bad thing which they give you permission to do 3 times or else they label you a person who did something shameful.

I wouldn’t use a service which treats me as a bad person because I happen to value my friends more than their licenses.

Whether the method they ultimately choose is worthwhile or not I cannot guess. I do think it is a good idea though. The entertainment industry isn’t going to win the copyright war by simply maintaining the status quo. At least this way Universal will be making some profit from downloaders while at the same time putting pressure on the other corporations (music and ISP’s both) to adapt in order to stay competitive. After all, isn’t that what we pirates have been saying they need to do all along, adapt?

Translation: “We need to keep making lots of money. If no, we dont like it. Better if we can also keep suing people.”

If an ISP, say, Comcast for example, were to offer unlimited music downloads and just added the subscription cost to my monthly bill, I’d be on that like stink on s**t.

But then again, I’m a stupid pothead, so I’m subject to delusions of grandeur at times.

Apparently they are more content with their current role as the “victim” so they can continue destroying people’s lives over the chump-change they’re supposedly missing out on.

also, the technology of bittorrent still doesn’t seem to be anywhere near their small brains.

Until that happens, though, I will stick with what I’ve got.

Piracy will always exist, especially with irrational laws that prohibits more then they allow for the common consumer.

However, for the general consumer there’s not much of point keeping copies of content if they got access to it by streaming in any way form and shape they per the situation want. ‘Hardcopies’ will still be bought by the collectors, the fans, and the nostalgic. Not much point in copying the ‘hardcopies’ if everyone has easy legal access to em anyway.

I mean, common, just look at Star Trek the original series ffs. Even though its gone complete circle numerous times, telly, re-run, crappy vcr copy, new vhs copy, the LD edition, d-vhs, dvd, re-runs on the telly in digital format even HD, and now legal and illegal digital streams….

Out it pops on the Blu-Ray format, and people go completely wohooo-mental. Take a friggin’ hint.

This would be a very difficult thing considering that “fair” and “reasonable” are the 2 concepts that have been lost in a modern circus, referred to as capitalism, for a LONG TIME!

OH NOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS, THERE GOES OUR JUSTIFICATION FOR OUR RAEPLAWSUITS HAAAALP!

I believe that most illegal file sharing people, have at the back of their mind, the worry that they will be caught at some time, and won’t mind paying a small fee to stop that happening, instead if the ridiculous fees in court.

People will use this, only if the price is right though.