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| quote: | Originally posted by Dj_Psygnosis
I might be wrong about the following point but i think i'm on the right track. Why are drugs illegal?, is it because the cops really want us not to get harmed by the bad substance, or are the government offended that drug dealers evade tax by selling drugs??
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Some drugs lead to physical addiction, some people who take drugs can get mentally addicted, when they are, and no money is left to buy drugs, what do they do? steal shit. Drugs lead to deaths from people taking bad stuff or overdosing. Drugs lead to a lot of social problems not only limited to stealing and death. Poverty from addiction, Congestion of the court system with petty offences due to drugs, Violence, Murder, a tonne of social problems. Drug dealers somewhere down line will have to pay tax proportionate to their declared income by laundering the money to make their earnings look legitimate or they can end up having their possessions seized and sold by the government (at least in W.A.). However that isnt to stop drug dealers declaring less than they actually earned and risking getting caught out. If the government was interested in tax money from drugs they would legalise them to an extent where registered retailers could sell them at a certain price (which im sure 80% of it would be tax) like smokes or alcahol.
Anyway on to the point of the article. This guy was getting busted for taking songs and taking a bassline or sample from them, and then using that in a mix cd he put together. Im pretty sure if he was just making a mix cd with original tracks he would be fine. Note how it said he used a computer to mix them, more than likely the tunes were mp3s.
Im not defending the situation and saying it was right to arrest him, it wasnt, and it is a pretty fucked up state of affairs when record companies arrest some one for something like this. I didnt see any mention of him selling the mix cds, just distributing, if he was selling them then they were right to arrest him in my opinion.
| quote: | | "I've been DJ-ing for 14 years; it's what I'm passionate about," he says. "I love this job, being here in the shop surrounded by the music. DJs are going to put out mixes regardless of what the record companies do. Nightclub promoters ask you for your demo, and any mix or demo you make is a bootleg. So they're going to have to sue every single DJ in the country. Get jukeboxes in every club - take it back to the '60s and '70s." |
Another point is that he was distributing these over the net to a lot of people in whatever "community" he was in. At least thats what i got from the article. When you make a mix cd to send to people you usually send it to a few friends and the appropriate places right? You dont avertise it THAT much and encourage everyone to download it, unless your an attention whore  which is possibly why he got busted? The Record Industry like going after high profile targets.
| quote: | | Speck was able to establish that some of the DJs were using songs by major artists like Mary J. Blige and Ja Rule without permission. |
Notice how the article is mostly on hip hop. However does this mean i cant play my Size DDD - Techno white label? Most probably, since it is a bootleg of an eminem track. Sure we may not like it, but it is the law. Therefore when some one decides to prosecute we dont really have a leg to stand on. I think ultimatley some record labels are more likely to go and find these people and make examples of them rather than others. Hopefully labels (and their distributors) which release trance are not going to follow the same line. Something interesting is when a record is released with an acapella on it (like quite a few hip hop records) does that mean i am not able to play the acapella over another track if i wanted? would that constitute sampling?
This problem stems from outdated business models, trying to recoup "losses" through outdated laws. I put "losses" in quotation marks because it is impossible to say the music industry has lost much. Personally through my mp3 use ive bought decks and spent more money on records in this past 6 months than probably ever would have on music in 10 years. It also needs to be pointed out that these "losses" are gains waiting to occur. If the music industry realised that then i doubt their would be as big of deal created by them.
Comparing these losses to what drug runners, and terrorists make and lumping standard users like DJs into this figure is total bullshit. Sure music piracy may fund organised crime. Easy money for an organisation who has the means of doing it on a large scale. Again, the means of doing it on large scale. This does not refer to people with CD burners, this refers to the people who sell duplicated cds with scanned covers at swapmeets and the like week after week. Which isnt a HUGE problem in australia, sure its there, but perhaps the record companies should check out asia? However, people who distribute the MP3 versions of these tracks over the internet are asking for trouble, they are easier to track, and their operating costs can be signifcantly lower than the pirates who duplicate cds. There user base is also a lot larger than that of piracy organisation. Making them prime targets for the record industry (unless like kazzaa they are all over the place) as they can send more music, to more people, for lesser cost. Even though they arnt making much/any profit out of it.
Does your average user want to spend 1 hour poking around the net and finding the hidden places to download from and spend even longer downloading it? No, im sure they would rather go to sonymusic.com and pay 10-15 dollars to be able to download that cd. I think the way amazon does business with ebooks will be the future of downloading music. You download a player which has a unique identification, pay money, download the book, and load it in the player. The player then contacts the server and checks if your able to play the book (i dont know the transactions exactly however), if you can you read the book all you want, if not you get an error.
Last edited by escee on Jun-30-2003 at 08:45
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) but some of the stuff in that article is bloody ridiculous. Arresting someone for making mixes, a demo tape, or remixes of copyrighted songs? It's pretty insane. So far as I'm concerned, the record companies can spend millions of dollars investigating DJs who - god forbid - are using a burnt copy of music they already own, but who is it, really who's going to suffer? The all pervasive mp3 culture or the record companies themselves?
