Posted by DJ_Strangelove at adsl-68-22-144-223.dsl.toldoh.ameritech.net on October 09, 2003 at 07:12:09:
In Reply to: rationalizing like a mother fucker! posted by Roman_Maronie on October 09, 2003 at 01:24:50:
: Ok, so we've decided that copying music isn't so bad. Ok, your favorite artist just came out with a new CD. Everyone in the world knows it's going to be on Kazaa, so they don't buy it. One person, who just likes the cover art, buys it and shares it on Kazaa. Everyone downloads it from that one person, and share it as well. Now Mr. Matthews (or whoever) has sold one cd to 2,000,000,000 people. According to your post, even that damn one person shouldn't have bought it, because if they had bothered to download it from some crooked record exec then they could have had it free, and not decreased the quantity!
: I'm not saying it's a horrible thing to do, I do it every damn day. I just realize that it is wrong, illegal, and probably bad for me in the long run!
This whole thread is fucked for so many reasons that time simply will not allow before I get into my stall for the daily rat race. That said, I'll touch on a couple of points:
1) Anyone who has a defective moral barometer that is so defective that he/she has to get the wheel-of-fate judgement of people they don't even know from an internet message board is just fucked up to begin with. The exaggeration: My relative needs one of my kidneys to stay alive, should I get it to 'em guys? 55% say: Hell no! Tell that bitch ass to get it from the black market like everyone else. 45% say: Yes, help your relative 'cuz it's the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it! Well, looks like Uncle Job just got fucked in the ear because Snoogans_Whatzisnutz decided to entrust morality to a buncha smartasses. The reality: Either download the goddamned movie or don't, either download the goddamned song or don't. If you do it and feel guilty about, or don't do it and feel pissy 'cuz you didn't you not only answered your own question but found out a little bit about something as you as a person.
Stepping off high horse and rolling in the shit with the rest of the folks, now:
Yeah, I download music and I don't mind for a second saying I do. Bring it on, ya RIAA fucks. Keep trying to tell me it's stealing when I download 2-3 songs from an album to judge its worth so I can decide if I feel like plunking down the 16 bucks, or by my currency exchange, 2 hours of physical fucking labor (ALWAYS before taxes of course) for a CD I feel is a worthy purchase that cost the fat corpulent record company a whopping buck or less to make. Watch in amazment as I download those songs, judge an album accordingly because let's face it folks you KNOW an album is gonna be good from a 1/3 (on the average) cross-section of songs, then go to the chain-music-store-electronics-crossover-megacomplex-of-doom-that-shut-down-the-mom-and-pop-place-I-used-to-go-to-cuz-they-kept-their-price-reasonable and put down the cash for the disk.
And that's the part people who make the blanket "That's stealing" judgement fail to see: What's it more wrong to do? Illegally download a couple of tracks before I buy the CD to make sure it's worth my money so that *I* don't get robbed as a consumer or simply let them take my money because they expected me to drool as I was forcefed the media blitz and eMpTV hype surrounding an album by an artist so shitty Kajagoogoo could kick their ass in a battle of the bands? The people who download massive amounts of movies, songs, etc and then never back those products they download number in the single percents. Let RIAA and the MPAA actually get off their fat asses and do some detective work instead of Witch Trialing their way through this.
Stepping off the soapbox so I can step onto a block of ice and go out via Joy Division,
DJ_Strangelove