[BC] Arrested for just telling people where to find Copywrited material.

[Broadcast List]

 From what I have seen, the suits and settlements HAVE had an effect  
on illegal downloading.

Most of my friends with tweens and teens have put their feet down and  
stopped illegal downloading in their homes.

Some have reported very angry kids, but most understand.  In once  
case blocking the peer-to-peer services nearly ended his problems  
with malware in his home of  many computers.


Yes, it is true that some unsupervised 15 year old is going to keep  
illegally trading music, but the news of the huge awards is stopping  
people who have anything to lose, and their kids.


And, I have nearly 7k songs on my "airplane iPod" and not a single  
one is downloaded, legally or illegally.  I own the CD for each and  
every song.  That is true of all my iPods, and my computers.  I  
haven't even gone into any station's music library and stolen a  
single song.  Why?  Not so much because it is illegal, but because it  
is WRONG.

Once can certainly argue that the record companies are huge, bloated,  
creativity sucking, uncaring, management heavy big businesses, but  
that isn't the point.  Stealing is stealing -- my parents must have  
made an impression.  Still, an average of $1.60 per CD (or record, or  
cassette) does seem a bit thin.  Radiohead just announced a week ago  
that their latest album had been downloaded over one million times,  
and the average donation has been £4 (Pound Sterling) or about  
$8.00.  That is over $8,000,000.00.  It appears the experiment has  
been a success.

When I was in college, there was a record store that would sell you a  
album, then buy it back within a short time -- I recall a week, but  
it may have been longer.  They then resold the album at a discount.   
The more times it went out and came back, the lower the price became,  
as well as the refund.  I used to buy the returned albums, and kept  
them.  Back in the day, the artwork on the album jacket and anything  
stuffed inside was worthy of respect (I still recall two Carley Simon  
albums...).  They also came with lyrics.

Today that tiny CD jacket can hardly have artwork on it.  Then the  
lyrics are frequently absent, and if they are there, they are so  
small they need a microscope to be read (especially with my aging  
eyes).  Still, I appreciate it if the cover is interesting, and if  
the lyrics are included.  I am slowly loading the lyrics into the  
tracks I own in iTunes, and I have scanned most of the covers, either  
from the CDs or the albums, or both.

While I am in middle age, I spent far too many years in Top-40 and  
CHR radio, where no one grows up (evidenced by many current and  
former DJs).  I still listen to a lot of current music.  No, not rap  
or hip-hop, but other current music, and I don't mind paying $12 for  
a disk of music -- much.  Eighteen Dollars is just TOO MUCH, and I  
believe the major reason the brick and mortar stores are fading  
away.  Circuit City and Best Buy are the exceptions to this, but I  
believe this is because they are not totally dependent upon music  
sales -- AND CIRCUIT CITY IS DOING ALL THEY CAN TO GO OUT OF  
BUSINESS, in my opinion.  They cannot even put and keep the CDs in  
alphabetical order.  If the CD (or DVD) isn't brand new and on and  
end-cap, I cannot find it in Circuit City, and I am not going to  
spend hours looking.  Wal-Mart suffers from the MESS problem too, but  
that is caused more by the customers.  In Circuit City it is the  
employees, and a general lack of caring.

WHICH leads me to the more important issue regarding record stores --  
service.  I know of one in Dayton, Ohio that provides good service, a  
few in Dallas, and a few in downtown Washington, DC, but I never go  
into that cesspool of a city anymore.  If the record stores cannot  
keep the stores in order how do they, or the record companies, expect  
me to buy music?

Back to downloading, if I could legally download uncompressed (or a  
format like Apple Lossless) music, I would just do that.  For me, 128  
kbit/s AAC just doesn't cut it.  (Don't get me started on 48 kbit/ 
s...)  Let me download the songs I want in a linear or loss-less  
format (or a high sample rate delta modulation format... the point is  
high quality), include some artwork and lyrics, and let me use the  
music I bought in the ways I want (on my home stereo, car stereo, and  
my iPods) and I will be very happy.

My guess is, so will the general public.  Add to this punishing those  
who steal, and I think the music industry will be fine.  It won't be  
the same, but it will be fine.

--chip

PS.  A bit unrelated, but I changed out the antenna at one of our  
stations.  Listening to the station I heard all kinds of things I  
could not explain.  It just sounded awful from place to place, and  
time to time.  I know oldies can be hard, but this was beyond what I  
found with oldies in the past.  With the antenna replaced, the  
station sounded better, but not right.  I later learned the music was  
from all sorts of sources, much of it was MP3 files.  We replaced all  
the music with uncompressed music, instructed the announcers no more  
saving as MP3s, and made it clear to the sales department that spots  
should be linear if possible (hey, it is THIER spot).  The station  
was fixed overnight (with the help of a 500 GB drive and a few hours  
of file transfers).

Just something to keep in mind when considering the quality of some  
digital transmission methods.

--chip

On Oct 22, 2007, at 12:09 AM, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote:
> Message: 8
> Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:46:35 -0600
> From: "Sid Schweiger" <sid at wrko.com>
> Subject: Re: [BC] Arrested for just telling people where to	find
> 	Copywrited material.
> To: <broadcast at radiolists.net>
> Message-ID: <s71b827f.024 at entbalms2.entercom.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
> [...]
> Maybe they ought to spend more time worrying about having viable  
> product
> to sell and less time running after children and 75-year-old
> grandmothers for $3000 settlement payments...while they simultaneously
> delude themselves into thinking that such actions will curtail illegal
> downloads.