Re: Re: Yes you are
Originally posted by Qball
All of your points are correct. I concede.
However, to borrow from one of your examples, I would say that I would never frequent a restuarant that I felt was ripping me off (too expensive, lame portions, portions that are too large, whatever).
Then don't buy music from the RIAA. Buy independants' music, assuming that more fits your value system, or don't buy music at all!
But if a friend had leftovers from the restaurant, I'd eat them!
Which is why this is a poor analogy. Food can only (normally ...) be eaten by one person. If it were somehow possible for your friend to go to this expensive restaurant, order a meal, eat the meal, then also allow everyone else standing in line to the restaurant to eat that meal, you'd have an equivalent analogy.
If your "friend" (however loosely you define that) is giving you his CD "leftovers" and physically removes them from his own possession, that is one thing (after-market sale). If he is keeping his "leftovers" then the analogy has failed.
When CD's first came out, the record companies said that costs would be high at first, just like CD players were, but that the costs would eventually fall in line with LP's and cassettes. Never happened, they lied.
Well, they didn't "lie". CDs definitely got cheaper, for them. They just got used to the profits and conveniently forgot to lower their prices fr the rest of us
Which is why, if you hurry, you can get a whole $25 back from the RIAA over a price-fixing class action suit ...
If you ask the RIAA why CDs are so expensive, they'll say that while the per-unit costs are much lower, the overhead costs have skyrocketed. Studio rentals, editors, and promotions all cost money. Granted, it is the record company paying itself rent on a studio it owns and contracting from itself the editor who gets paid a salary, but these are called "costs" nonetheless.
But, in the end, it is
your fault (and mine), not theirs, that CDs still cost as much as they do. In any market with inflexible demand, prices will rise to the limit of what the market will bear (ie, where the demand suddenly becomes "flexible"). If CDs were really too expensive, we wouldn't have been buying them these last 20 years.
On the other hand, today there are thousands of musicians out there peddling their wares for just a little over the cost of CD duplication. If you want low-cost music, that's your best bet.
And, in the past, we used double-cassette recorders with nary a stink -- you could borrow a friend's tape and make a copy. No moral "stealing" argument from the RIAA. But now that technology has greased the wheels, oh NOW we have a problem.
No "stink" was raised not because it was legal (don't call it "fair use" ... "fair use" doesn't cover duplication and distribution), but because the copies made in that manner were of low enough quality that the number of generations were limited, and thus the overall impact of copying was limited. With MP3s, copying (not encoding/decoding, file copying) is lossless, and thus the number of potential generations is limitted by the number of interested parties ... a single purchase could easily spread out such that everyone on the planet has a second-generation-quality copy.
Given that the previous situation was tolerated for technical reasons only, it is natural that technical progress would eventually make the situation no longer tolerable.
