Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 26th Aug 2009 13:22 UTC
Not too long ago we had a semi-loss for The Pirate Bay in The Netherlands, which was convicted 'by default' because the defendants did not show up in court to plea their case. Today, The Netherlands once again saw a ruling in a high-profile piracy case, and again, there's a loss for the defendants. Update: Oh, and by the way - thought about putting some lyrics you like on your website or blog? Think again. We live in a crazy world, people.
Permalink for comment 380712
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-08
A good and insightful comment, David.
Laws should guarantee some kind of a balance, not let some party and their greed become the ruling principle in a society but protect all parties from the greed of others.
There are lots of myths surrounding the discussion related to piracy.
In many cases when people download pirated movies or music, they probably would not have gone buying that stuff if the torrent sites didn't give it to them free. Piracy may, of course, hurt business to some extent, but the big figures usually presented as lost money because of piracy are an exaggerated myth.
Or, is it really so that when someone reads Bob Dylan's lyrics for free online, Bob Dylan just lost a lot of money because of that? Of course not, that idea is just ridiculous. In fact, reading Dylan's lyrics online could also be seen as a good advertisement for Dylan, encouraging people to buy his music and writings too.
In fact, there are cases when publishing commercial video content online for free has actually encouraged the sales of that material, like when the Monty Python group put much of their material online for free:
"Monty Python's free web video increased DVD sales by 23,000 percent"
http://boingboing.net/2009/01/23/monty-pythons-free-w.html
People, both the entertainment/software industries and individual downloaders of pirated content tend to see things from their own narrow perspective only without considering the wider circumstances and context. People tend to be greedy, both ordinary consumers and the industry giants. Piracy can be wrong, but neither is the entertainment industry always a pure white angel serving the interests of the public and artists only. All too often they seem to be in the business only for the money, big money, giving not much consideration to the real interests of artists or consumers.
There are many examples from the past. Let's take Jimi Hendrix as an example. The guy was a true artist and musical innovator but both during his life and even after his death he was constantly ripped off by the greedy entertainment industry who didn't seem to give any respect for his music and artistic standards and ideas. He was not allowed to concentrate on making new music but was pushed to long tours that finally seemed to have burnt him out completely. After his death all material left from him like very low class rehearsal tapes etc. have been sold as genuine Hendrix material by the greedy music industry.
Is the music industry really serving the interests of the artists in cases like this? Certainly not, and I don't think the situation has gotten any better since then, considering, for example, the (IMHO) awful quality of most popular music today.
Edited 2009-08-26 16:28 UTC