yeah ok frak you pal

it doesn't apply because it's not about intellectual property. you can clone a house design all you like, because your basic suburban house design isn't copyrightable, you're the one putting up the funds for building materials. this is in stark contrast to waiting for someone to finish something and then just distributing what they made.

You are obtusely going too far into comparing houses and music. Any analogy breaks down if you over analyze them while missing its point on purpose. The point was comparing the work of going through building a house to the work of commercializing a song, with their respective costs and expected revenues, and then what happens when you take out the product's marketability by having new technology that takes out the worth of single units of the product (a single house vs. a single CD)by making them easy to reproduce. Whether houses are copyrightable or not is meaningless here. Analogies man.

unrealistic is not the same as right. the current music model is flawed and definitely not sustainable, but that doesn't mean you have a right to put up a torrent of britneys latest album. and the industry IS moving forward, albeit slowly - i can listen to fully licensed music free on spotify right now.
the analogies that the music industry use to combat piracy, however incorrect, do not make the act of copyright infringement acceptable. (im fully aware that actually downloading copyrighted media isn't illegal in itself - it's sharing that is illegal. although in the age of torrents the two are blurred. and BTW: ive never argued against actually downloading for this reason. my argument is purely against copyright infringement - illegal distribution. which is what the pirate bay do.)

I believe its entirely right to put up a torrent of Britney's latest album. Its Britney's right to try and stop people from sharing her songs in whatever way she wants, but If I have a music file on my hard drive, I can share it to whoever I want. Too bad for Britney. If they don't want me to be able to share it, make it impossible for me to record, because otherwise its up for grabs. It really is a big shame to artists who work strictly digitally, it makes whatever they make pretty much unsellable as units since no "real", physical version of the work can be sold, while a painter can sell a painting, which will always have a higher worth than say a digital photo of it (unless the digital artist keeps a high resolution version of his work and only prints out limited resolution versions, in which case he can try to sell a full-resolution print or something, but whoever buys it could then scan and distribute the fuck out of it... too bad...)
I don't believe sharing music is violating anyone's intellectual property. Its too bad for artists, hell its too bad for me, but its not wrong, and I wont let personal bias from my own interests interfere with my honest opinions.
I don't believe I have the right to claim I composed someone's songs however, or use their art as part of my own or in some commercial work or as some way of representing myself without their consent. I am pretty sure it is what Jamicus really meant when saying he doesn't believe in intellectual property, and what he really meant is that he doesn't believe in the current definition of copyrights. IP and copyrights as terms are often swapped by mistake. (Correct me if I'm wrong there Jamie)

well im sure glad you can just sit back and accept piracy as something that is fine and dandy like that. i feel that most people would have a bit more backbone in this matter, especially if it was their means of living.

Right, I hold these views because I'm weak and cant stand up for myself and my intellectual property, not because I thought about it or anything. You are pretty condescending.

If I have a music file on my hard drive, I can share it to whoever I want.

why? because it's in your possession?

you're an artist. let's say you sell prints. if someone bought a copy of your print and then bought a printer and sat right outside your studio distributing free full-size prints of your art, you're telling me you wouldn't take some kind of action?

foooor the record i don't really give a shit about the legalities of stealing because i generally try to pay for content that i think is worth the money and the entertainment industry is bloated anyhow, but that doesn't mean i have a right to it. it just means i don't give a shit. you don't have a right to steal things. the pirate bay was facilitating theft so i don't feel too bad for them.

I could try to shoo him off I guess, but I don't think what the guy does would be wrong, no.

As I said, its too bad for digital artists because anything we do is very hard to sell: If something can be easily reproduced and keep its entire original value it is inherently worthless as something to sell, not accounting the materials, time and skill needed for the reproduction itself (in the case of a any digital file, its free, instantaneous and easy, whoops). Its unfair, it really is, but its the sad truth. All I would be doing by selling the prints to begin with, is sell the service and materials for printing out the image I made, unless I found a way to somehow keep monopoly over the image (for instance if the image was hand painted like I said before, copies of it would always have a lesser value)

Hey I can't access TPB. Does it happen to everyone or is the site banned in our place?

I can't connect to it and more than a third of the servers hosttracker uses to ping other sites timed out.

I never could reply to this because I was gone for a few weeks, but man what a horrible argument. And I'm completely ignoring your decision to be as unpleasant as possible in conveying this. (Even though it's like you're trying to say "mine is the most inconvenient argument of all, therefore it is true", which warrants a response all by itself.)

In case you didn't notice, the record companies that run that entire business are overcharging their products, underpaying their artists and stalwartly refusing to adapt to any modern advance (Compact Cassette, VCR, the internet), stating they'll "go out of business" if you so much as think about tainting their patronage with those copyright crime tools. Of course they've never been able to prove this, seen as how they're still raking in record profits, and the video game industry—which has been subject to internet-based copyright infringement much earlier than music and movies—is now bigger than the movie industry. While I don't expect laypeople to understand this, it's baffling that someone who's used the internet as much as much as you have to not get that this is about the impending dissolvement of large, monopolistic parties that have historically dominated this trade in favor of smaller, independent parties.

The reason piracy became a major phenomenon at all is because these content owners have obstinately refused to make use of these new platforms. They are fighting tooth and nail to prevent it from happening. Yet everybody wants it to. It's like they're trying to swim back up the waterfall. Ultimately they'll have to give up and concede, because no business can survive if it can't provide its customers with the products they want. Given how the major copyright coalition and its puppet organization the RIAA have a functional monopoly over popular music, the only alternative people that's available right now is illegal downloading!

So, you think nobody has the right to be a pirate? Maybe. But isn't that the same as saying it's immoral to want to break out of the monopolistic grip of an ancient and obsolete organization that doesn't want to sell you the product you want?

All you're seeing here is the everyday occurrence of a company failing in a capitalist economy. Except for the fact it fights back by suing people and websites under looney legal principles and with flakey evidence, that's all this is! Explain again why we should feel so sorry?

I'd also like to add that the Internet has helped A LOT of smaller labels get more money because they can advertise their products pretty much anywhere and contact with the customers is easier through the internet than let's say snail mail. Not only that, but a crapload of bands a lot of people listen to they wouldn't have known about them without downloading. I download a crapton of CDs, the artists I want to support (especially the smaller artists that aren't supported by a big money whore label) I'll buy their CDs, LPs and so on.

Actually, in the last few years it's crazy how there's been proliferation of so many small labels and distros. It's a lot easier than before and although it won't make you a millionaire you can still make money from it and get a crapload of CDs, LPs, tapes and shift for a lot cheaper.