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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll
See, I can agree to an extent with all of this. I hate the idea of anyone being charged for singing someone else's song.
But a recording is not an idea. It's a physical thing. And making copies of that physical thing in order to freeload off the production costs of it is, well, piracy.
Go ahead and copy the idea, but make your own recording.
'Course, I'm a hypocrite here, but I'm fond of Ghandi's view on that.
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Yes, copying an MP3 is violating an intellectual monopoly.
A recording is not a physical thing -- or at least, the thing people care about isn't the physical thing. The thing people care about isn't the medium, it is the message. The information contained in the recording is what the intellectual monopoly covers.
For example, I can walk over to a store and purchase a piece of plastic that has information written on it. I own that piece of plastic.
However, copyright covers the
information encoded on the plastic. And information is the warp and weave of thought itself.
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I look at it more as a regulation of everyone else's ability to copy the products of ideas.
Or did you formulate all the necessary computer code for that mp3 in your mind?
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Resampling a song, reediting a movie, whisting a song in the shower, taking a picture of a beautiful building, designing "taste-alike" cola, covering a piece -- the difference to me is one of fidelity and medium. And, in some cases, legality under the current regeme.
To a technically proficient person, taking a live-air recording and turning it into an MP3 is a tool-based varient of you whistling the same tune. Or taking the information streamed into your house on a TV cable and creating a TV-on-demand computer system. Or reediting a hollywood picture so that it has no nudity or swear words.
It is my opinion that you should not legally be allowed to whistle a cover of a song to an audience for profit anymore than you should be able to mass produce and sell bootleg copies of the phantom menace 1 day after it hits theatres.
At the same time, I would hold that preventing you from making an MP3 copy of a song so you can listen to it on your cell phone, or on your computer, or in your car, is just as injust as preventing you from whistling the song in the shower.
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And actually, I don't view this as necessary for the actual musical ideas (read: not mp3s, ideas) that the music community puts out there. A song being used in a cover band is vastly different from a knockoff copy of a drug that took millions or more to develop.
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No, it is not. At least, not more than quantitatively.
That cover band took the recipie for the song, and reproduced it. Possibly the cover band purchased a copy of the song and reverse-engeneered the music -- or possibly they simply purchased the recipie (sheet music) and performed the song without the reverse engeneering process.
That generic drug manufacturer either worked out the recipie via reverse engeneering, or got the recipie some other way. They then produced the results of the recipie.
The value is in the idea, not the item. Ownership of ideas is evil, because the wealth of an idea can be reproduced with little cost and potentially unbounded benefit. This evil can be balanced, I believe, in limited ways for limited times in order to encourage the expression, production, testing and deployment of ideas.
But the idea that copyright violation is akin to theft or piracy is ridiculous. Theft and piracy is a destructive act -- after the act of theft or piracy, the world is no richer. Duplication and sharing of ideas is a creative act, if only a minor one. Restricting that duplication
can be just, but only if it generates an overwealming benefit to balance the evil of the restriction.