Music Chief Says He'll Crush Digital Music Sites

from the people-who-don't-get-it dept

Fri, Jun 30th 2000 3:37pm — Mike Masnick

Ah, the day after a former music exec showed he has some understanding of digital music, a current music exec shows he still doesn't get it. When will someone explain to these guys that downloading a song is not the same thing as shoplifting a CD from a store. I'm getting tired of this.

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someone, 1 Jul 2000 @ 7:18pm

hrm, well
let's not kid ourselves here, sure you're not stealing the cd yourself, but someone bought it to encode it, and so on. if somebody steals a cd from a store and gives it to you, you didn't steal it, but you profited from the theft. if there's no demand, there's no reason to do the crime.
note, i'm not anti mp3 or anything, but let's be honest, you're not paying for it, it's theft.
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Mike (profile), 1 Jul 2000 @ 10:37pm

Re: hrm, well
I've made this argument many times... in order for it to be theft, then someone must have had something taken away from them which they no longer have. In the case of digital music, no one has *lost* anything. The original owner still retains a copy. This is not true of stealing a CD. There's a lot more to this, but they are NOT the same thing. When the product is digital, and can be reproduced for free, then the *correct* price for it is what the market sets, and the market has clearly set the price of MP3s to be zero. There's no theft involved as far as I can see. Theft doesn't mean cost = 0 it means someone has had something taken away from them... which is not the case when you download a digital copy of something.
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