I have about 700 DVDs and CDs. All ripped. None of it shared anywhere.
I'm now severely tempted to stop buying and start pirating, seeing as I'll be a criminal either way.
I'm now severely tempted to stop buying and start pirating, seeing as I'll be a criminal either way.
I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties, who are citizens or corporations in good standing with legal rights of their own. The government can't just facilitate a practice which will foreseeably result in some injury to one group of people and then leave that group at a legal disadvantage; it creates the opposite of a level playing field by saying that some peoples' economic interests are less important than others.
A lot of people make the argument that technology has changed the market, so content producers shouldn't expect to have their incomes protected, because we didn't protect the manufacture of buggy whips in response to the popularity of modern cars. But this is flawed reasoning. In a case like that, demand shifted away from horse-drawn vehicles (and their peripheral goods like buggy whips) towards mechanically-powered ones. In the case of music and movies, demand for the product has not shifted to something else - people still love to consume music, watch movies etc. What's different is that you can now frequently get the same product you wanted before, at the same level of quality, and enjoy it the same way, but without paying for it, if you are so inclined. In this case, technology hasn't altered the product itself, but rather the economic relations of product distribution.
So even if you are super cutting-edge as an artist/publisher, and you decide to make high-quality, device-agnostic digital copies of your work available to consumers from day 1, you are still faced with the problem that some consumers will decide to upload it to file-sharing sites, and many others will choose to download it and subsequently enjoy it without bothering to pay anything while you watch your sales dry up. The equilibrium price asymptotically approaches zero because sellers no longer have any control over the supply curve, so all of the economic surplus goes to consumers and little or none goes to producers, who are thus disincentivized from further creation because they are no longer able to make a living as before even though demand for their product may be as strong as ever.
Interestingly, when electronic music - ie recordings of electronic oscillators, filters and modulators, bleeps and bloops - first got going in the UK in the 1950s, the first creators were unable to get artistic credit because the body that administers royalties wouldn't accept the output as music or recognize a creative input, partly out of fear that mechanically produced music would destroy jobs for musicians who played conventional instruments, and in the 1980s there was a pushback from the musician's union against multi-timbral synthesizers/sequencers that could replace whole groups of musicians. Those really are anti-technology, anti-market initiatives but they ultimately went nowhere, notwithstanding that the rise in popularity of electronic music did result in some economic displacement.
How copying your own CD to listen in mp3 format is copyright infringement?
Ripping it and then shoring it with others who download it for free is copyright infringement. A percentage of people do that, and the court is saying that the government has an obligation to deal with that.
And the music industry will ask themselves why there is such piracy.
Well done, they are doing everything possible to be irelevants and to die