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Underground > Radio & Music >

Downloading music

Jake, Colossus of Clout

04:21 / 26.05.06

So. I've got this buddy who has been downloading lots of music from Bittorrent. He's a little worried about the RIAA and other bastard organizations tracking him down and charging him with millions of dollars of reparations for downloading music. Is this a legitimate fear?

07:58 / 26.05.06

Well, it's a legitimate fear in that people have been done for this stuff so it's definitely a possibility. But then so is being hit by a meteor but it's not something anyone would spend time worrying about so it's more about how high is the chance of you getting picked up for it. I've not been following the legal cases very closely recently but as a generalisation I'd say the chances are greater if you live in the US simply because the RIAA et al have been more active there. As I understand you're also more at risk if you're uploading as they've been targeting people who make stuff available over those who just grab what's there. Anyway, pretty much everyone I know (in the UK) downloads music and no one's ever had even a sniff of legal trouble but I realise that's hardly conctrete evidence. If you're feeling particularly worried you could install something like PeerGuardian which blocks people connecting to your machine from a constantly updated list of IP addresses. The blocklist covers known RIAA affiliates, government agencies, that sort of thing. I don't know how useful such a thing is in reality but I've got it installed with the justification that it can't hurt and certainly the logs of IP's it blocks make for interesting and sometimes scary reading. Oh, the URL is:

http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

08:18 / 26.05.06

Here is a related thread from Dissensus

It has some news stories in you might find useful.

09:21 / 26.05.06

Might get a ton more response if ya move to music forum.

13:25 / 26.05.06

I've always assumed that they mostly tackle the people with hundreds of gigabytes of stuff, rather than your average user. But this might not be too true. They might be starting to take potshots at the more genera; downloaders to try to strike fear in all our heart etc etc.

You friend could also use a proxy connection such as Tor which will make it very difficult for anybody to track hir ip address. It will slow down hir downloads though, which is a bummer.

And even if ze does get grabbed by them, ze can rest in the knowledge that They are the evil ones and ze is just a martyr to a good cause.

Not sure how comforting that one would be really...

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:43 / 26.05.06

And even if ze does get grabbed by them, ze can rest in the knowledge that They are the evil ones and ze is just a martyr to a good cause.

Really? Although I find the behaviour of the RIAA absolutely disgusting, I'm not convinced that the idea of musicians being paid for what they do is necesssrily in itself evil. I think downloading music (or TV, or software, or whatever) is quite an ethically complex process. So, what is and is not "good" or "evil" about downloading music and about suing people who download music? What possible solutions to this abusive cycle exist?

15:36 / 26.05.06

Sorry. That was meant to be a bit more tongue in cheek that it reads.

I'm in full accord that musicians need to receive payment for their contributions. I can also agree that the record companies deserve some payment (for publishing costs, advertising etc). But 'stuff i've read' shows that must of the money ends up going to the record companies, and not the artists. I don't agree with this state of large companies essentially acting as pimps for the artists. This is what I meant by 'evil ones' - the people seeking to make inflated amounts of money from someone else's talents.

Some laugh at it, but i agree with the argument that filesharing actually serves to promote an artist. If an album is good, I'm likely to end up buying it, cos i like to have the nice cd with the inlays and stuff. If it's a shit album, then they probably didn't deserve my money anyway.

Arguably, the current wave of songs-for-download could serve to free up the market and help move away from the 'pimp' situation - artists can have a website where they can sell tracks easily using paypal or somesuch method. They can thus cut out the need for the middleman in terms of the costs of cd manufaturing etc. The increasing effectiveness of viral marketing means less money is needed to bring about awareness of a band.

While it's ideal for an artist to be able to support hirself through their work, and we should definitely encourage such ways of life, I also feel that the large part of artistic expression is just about 'getting it out there and getting it heard'. Better that people actually hear your music and enjoy it than be arrested for doing so.

Just some thoughts really. But yeah. Ethically complex.

05:47 / 08.06.06

Due to the nature of my musical tastes, I tend to download a lot of music by artists who couldn't profit from my purchase of their work--because they're dead. Even if I bought his whole discography, Charles Mingus wouldn't see a cent of it. It's awfully hard for me to feel any sort of guilt or ethical obligation about that kind of a download.

As for still-living artists, I'll second the notion that bittorrent et al has gotten me to buy more music than I would have without the easily downloaded alternatives. If an artist sounds interesting, it only costs me bandwidth and time to download something of theirs. If I like it, I'm pretty likely to go out and purchase more of their work. I'll even buy an album I've already downloaded, so that I can re-encode it at a higher-quality bitrate than available over p2p. I have no idea if I'm in the majority on this, but that's been my experience.