Napster or Nopester?

[Homeloaf]

Should Peer to Peer file sharing be legal? Should you have to pay? It's all up to you, you're the next contestant on the Price I$ Right!!! ;D

[earlofqb]

It should be legal, so long as you aren't downloading any works that have artists that are still activly touring routinely (ie the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Kiss, etc).

I figure this because the artists aren't still selling merchandise (well, Pink Floyd still is, with their myriad infomercials about buying "The Best Of: The Wall" and remixes of their old songs; however they aren't actively producing music, so the only people still buying "new" music from them are either fools or people that have no where to get Pink Floyd records/cds), so why still charge for their music? There's no one profiting from them anymore, so release their stuff to the public domain.

If this were done, a good 50% of RIAA cases could be thrown out. Why must the RIAA try to profit from a band that isn't even together anymore? The worst part is that they've even sued over people downloading classical works (ie Bach, Beethoven), and there is no estate or anything to collect money. Thus, the RIAA pockets the cash and goes after another 10 year old who got bored one day.

The cycle continues and no one (save one) will fight them (the one who fights is now almost bankrupt, and will have to settle out of court in order to live (that person has a family and they're foolish enough to risk it all over a court case? I'm not known as someone to abandon principles, however this person needs to think of their family first. Let a college student sue them, they've their entire lives to pay the costs and have no one who immediately needs their support). Fortunately, a band of lawyers is currently working legal strategy to contest the very nature of RIAA's cases: that the P2P users are supposedly profiting from this.

As far as I know, no P2P user profits from anything. Period. It is all done free and out of generosity. Further, P2P actually has increased sales of CDs and merchandise since it has started being popular. So, really P2P is probably the best marketing tool the RIAA could use (let them redistribute a song, and if people like it, they'll go out and buy it. Sure, you'll have people who'll keep downloading songs, but these are very few people compared to the total population of music listeners).

So, in a word, yes, P2P should be legal. Even if it weren't P2P, in this Internet society, people'd find ways to share music. Actually, P2P is more comperable to burning a CD and giving it to someone than it is to stealing. Of course, the Sony rootkit fiasco shows that even burning CDs may one day be a lost art. Corporate greed will ruin the free economy, and someday we'll be paying for radio (in the real world) and for every minute we're online. We might even end up paying per show to watch TV (so, instead of 50 usd a month for cable, you pay 500 usd a month for the hours of shows you watch. Of course, you still have to endure commercials too) someday.

I blame Steve Jobs for creating the pay-as-you-go system. Sure, it fixed the legal problems, but it opens up an entire slew of future legal problems.

[Mikrondel]

I think p2p file sharing is a great way of spreading files because you can get different parts from different places, so the sources of the file are a lot less heavily strained.

However if you paid for each song while still using that system it would be ideal.

[earlofqb]

My ideal isn't completely free (many have interpreted that, as some have for a few other P2P supportive writings I've written), but rather that you pay a flat fee to download all that you want. Throw out the expiration dates and all that. You pay 50 usd a month to download (and keep forever) all that you want. Bandwidth congestion would stop you from downloading a thousand songs, and simple laziness (I still have this?) would mean that a lot of songs would go undownloaded after you "paid" for them.

Now, some may wonder how this goes with my previous post. I believe that if a song is old enough that no artists are collecting royalties from it, it should be free. So, we add that with the above idea to create two P2P networks: one for free music (following the "elderly" rule) and one for royalty-paid music. Then, everyone would be happy (generally, however enough would be happy that the disgruntled few who'd pirate new music would be negligable).

Of course, some may feel jelous that because old music is free, new music should be. In this case, the court should fire that person from their job for 30 days, to show them how someone would feel when their livlihood was stolen from them.