Is Music Trading The Prohibition Of Our Age?
from the is-it-really? dept
This analogy is becoming increasingly popular. This is at least the fourth or fifth article I've seen use it in the last month. More and more people are saying that music sharing is the Prohibition of our age. Just like at that time, the millions and millions of people who are "breaking the law" even as they think what they do shouldn't be illegal at all, are moving increasingly underground to continue sharing music. Again, this isn't a surprise, but the end result is (as was predicted) that the music industry has done nothing to actually help their business. The question is whether or not the analogy holds. People like to tie the newer file sharing applications to the old speakeasy setup, and talk about how Prohibition "created" organized crime - and wonder what the RIAA's attack on file sharing will bring us. I think the analogy sounds nice, but I doubt that the file sharing lawsuits will have nearly the same sort of impact on our culture that Prohibition did.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No
2. Filesharing negatively affects the producer of the product, not the consumer (and people that interact with them)
3. The criminals are the consumer themselves
The current Prohibition is for recreational drugs.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
What if certain prohibitions do work?
Music does have harmful health effects upon people: it ruins children's hearing; it creates noise pollution; it contributes to a speakeasy culture of nightclubs, rap or metal concerts, where violent crimes and drug dealing are prevalent.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Smokers are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Forbid cigarettes => organized crime
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Music Listeners are murderers
Generations of young people have been walking around with electronic machines strapped to their heads to induce violent behavior or destroy their hearing. Last I checked, the percentage of hearing people who say they like music stands at well over 99.9%.
There is a subculture of a sound-free world that lives in the shadows of mainstream society, with their own language. To compare these two groups, music lovers are 140 times more likely to commit violent crimes, 37 times more likely to be infected with the AIDS virus, and sexually abuse 54% of deaf boys and 50% of deaf girls.
(Check http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/12/18_crimes.html)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Great Music Haters
Charles Babbage, the father of modern computing:
"Lady Lovelace wrote that Babbage hated music. He tolerated its more exquisite forms, but abhorred it as practiced on the street. "Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied", he wrote with some seriousness in Observations of Street Nuisances in 1864, "receive [street music] with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum of time". He calculated that 25% of his working power had been destroyed by street nuisances, many of them intentional. Letters to the Times and the eventual enforcement of "Babbage's Act", which would squelch street nuisances, made him the target of ridicule.
The public tormented him with an unending parade of fiddlers, Punch-and-Judys, stilt-walkers, fanatic psalmists, and tub-thumpers. Some neighbors hired musicians to play outside his windows. Others willfully annoyed him with worn-out or damaged wind instruments. Placards were hung in local shops, abusing him. During one 80-day period Babbage counted 165 nuisances. One brass band played for five hours, with only a brief intermission. Another blew a penny tin whistle out his window toward Babbage's garden for a half and hour daily, for "many months".
When Babbage went out, children followed and cursed him. Adults followed, too, but at a distance. Over a hundred people once skulked behind him before he could find a constable to disperse them. Dead cats and other "offensive materials" were thrown at his house. Windows were broken. A man told him, "You deserve to have your house burnt up, and yourself in it, and I will do it for you, you old villain". Even when he was on his deathbed, the organ-grinders ground implacably away. "
[ link to this | view in thread ]
More likely than whom?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Statistics if there were no music?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Statistics if there were no music?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
Blaming music for crime is just as stupid as blaming movies or TV. Does Stravinsky cause violent crime? Strauss? Beethoven? Comparing music lovers to non-music lovers in relation to crime statistics is just asinine.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
What addiction?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: What if certain prohibitions do work?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
uh, the prohibition of our time is:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/culture/essay.html
The National Center for Health Statistics places the number of profoundly deaf in the U.S. at more than 400,000, while people classified as hard-of-hearing number over 20 million, or about 8 percent of the total population. Within the actual ranks of deaf people, more than half reportedly use American Sign Language (ASL) on a regular basis.
>Blaming music for crime is just as stupid as blaming movies or TV.
Is blaming drug addiction for crime stupid?
>Does Stravinsky cause violent crime? Strauss? Beethoven?
What we need is more research to determine which kinds of music cause which crimes, to better regulate them. I have a feeling the composers you mention cause a high degree of sociopathic behaviors, including introversion, superiority complexes, and hysterical tempers.
I have to go to math class now, so I'll find the statistics on crime by hearing vs. deaf people later. Though, is it that hard to believe that deaf people are less likely to be violent criminals?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
Dorpus may have a different view than most people, but at least he or she has the ability to cite sources and engage in thought provoking commentary. You do not and its evident.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Filesharing as Prohibition?
I don't think so -- Prohibition was about political restrictions on what you could do with your own body. It still holds today, with restrictions on cannabis, firearms, certain words from people of certain ancestry.
In "filesharing" you're using someone else's work without their permission, so it's probably closer to (brace yourself!) Slavery than to Prohibition.
Yes, the big record companies have been more like plantation owners, true, but that "we can 'share' your bits" line just changes who Massa is. We need emancipation and self-determination for the creative minority.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
Come on, this is getting really stupid.
Dorpus is a troll, he normally throws out a rediculous statement and then tries to back it up with "research" from the internet even though he has told me and others that he doesn't trust facts spouted on the internet. I guess every site he gets his information from is not some "quack" site on the internet, though everything anyone else points him too is.
Lets not feed the troll, and he'll go away.
I agree with Oliver Wendell Jones, Techdirt needs user controllable filters so that we can block Dorpus (and the anonymous cowards that have nothing better to say most of the time, and wish to troll behind the AC name,) out. It isn't that he doesn't have anything to say, it is that he is in serious need of a clue and those who have tried to give him one suffer his immature onslaught of misinformation.
Maybe Dorpus is the Iraqi Information Minister? I wondered where that guy went, but I thought he had gotten a job with Microsoft...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
I will quote facts from the net that happen to be accurate.
Case in point. Need I say more.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
Dorpus is a troll. I'm amazed anyone here takes him seriously anymore. If you think his commentary is thought provoking then you've never had an original thought before.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Music Listeners are murderers
[ link to this | view in thread ]