But as someone pointed out to me, how is downloading songs off the internet for personal use any different than taping songs off the radio, recording movies off tv?
At least part of the difference is quality and utility. If you borrow a book from the library, you can't make margin notes and you can't keep the book for future reference. If you tape music from the radio, the sound really isn't very good. Same with movies. I'm not sensitive enough to quality to mind watching a taped movie but I expect fidelity from the music to which I listen. And, if you make copies of the material for friends, you can only pass it along to a few, such is the medium.
I agree with you that there's little difference in concept, but the practicalities are quite different--the orders of magnitude of the distribution opportunities. You can make copies of digital music, as fine in quality as the original, and send it to a bazillion of your closest friends in the blink of an eye. In the old paradigm, enough people bought books and music because they wanted the quality or a copy of their own to keep and only shared it with a few others. The producers lost some money, but still made enough to stay in business. Now, an author or a musical artist could find himself selling only a handful of copies, enough to duplicate, with the rest of the world getting theirs for free. Libraries didn't wreck the book business, although it might have looked ominous at the time. Perhaps computer copies won't wreck the music business, either, but it doesn't look good. These folks gotta get paid somehow or there won't be any product to copy.
Karen |
