Feds to audiophiles: You're all pirates now

"the morality of listening to a sound...."
"The information as been freed from the medium..."
Dusty, wise words from a man who appears to get it.
Music is after all just a sound and once that sound is freed from the composer it belongs to all of us and at the same time, none of us. It's a fairly easy concept to grasp.

Pascalini, as to the artists demanding and enforcing the way the medium is accessed, the problem is that the medium is now 1's and 0's, and the access point is almost anything electronic. After a sound (with sound being inherently analog) is converted to a digital form, it can be forwarded, copied, and pasted just like a line of text. All the information you see or hear from a computer is essentially the same stuff.

Look at it this way: you can build some little sand castles near the shoreline, and then build a nice big robust sand castle next to those ones, with a nice big sand wall and moat surrounding it. The little sand castles will wash away soonest, and the big one will take a little longer because it has all the extra stuff, but it will all wash away because it's all sand! That's what we're dealing with in the digital world as well. Everything is 1's and 0's, including the security and rights management software that protects the song which is also encoded in 1's and 0's.

With the information being freed from the medium, the only way to control the access of the music would be to control access to computers (or in my analogy above, the access to the beach.)

The point is this: Pandora's box has been opened. If you're familiar with that Greek myth you'll know that there was no way to get the evil back into the box, but there was hope contained in the box as well. The digital demon has escaped, but if the Labels could just recognize that this has also released an opportunity for amazing profits that can also make their consumers happy and their artists rich, then we would all be happier listeners!

-Dusty

Amazing what Ganja does to the thinking process....
If I ride my bike to the corner grocery store, put the kickstand down, go inside to buy an ice cream pop and talk to the shopkeeper for a bit -

The Bicycle has been Freed from it's Rider!

Hallelujah!

Someone may take my liberated bike, but I'm sure next time they'll come into the store and buy a bike from me since they liked the last one so much - I should probably buy lots of bikes and leave them outside stores - I'll be rich!!!.

Opalchip -

You're making the same argument again that you made earlier about stealing an iPod. I've already addressed that above. There is a BIG difference, legally, physically, (possibly not morally, that's the debate here), between taking something that someone will no longer be able to use once you have taken it (such as a bike, iPod, or any physical object you may choose), and enjoying something for free when you should be crediting the creator of whatever you're enjoying.

Music is an idea, not an object. If you want a stronger argument, and you're tied to the idea of a physical object, then you could talk about the patent for a bike. If someone obtained the plans for the design of a bike and then photocopied it and posted it on the internet, then you would be closer to the argument at hand.

If you want to make the point that stealing is morally wrong no matter what form it is in, then you'll need to find a way to say that without blurring the line between property law and copyright law. They are separate things. You feel that they are both wrong, and that's your opinion, but they ARE separate things.

-Dusty

Hi - I understand that there's a difference between an Ipod/Bike and what you hear at a live concert. The point I'm making is that theft is not justifiable by some potential benefit that the thief, in his mind, perceives might accrue to the victim.

A Digital File is a "thing". It may be covered under copyright law, but it is a physical thing that someone went to a lot of trouble to create. It doesn't dissipate into thin air like live music - it's can be sitting on a CD or a hard drive. We don't buy them - we license them, complete with the terms that stipulate you cannot copy and distribute the file.

One point you're missing is that the owner of the file (the artist) will now NOT be able to sell that file to whomever you give it to (or to you). You have removed that listener's potential purchase forever, when you had agreed (as the original buyer) not to do that. It's cut and dried to me.