The other issue is no matter what you do, there will be a way to record that feed, which means cleaner pirated copies will hit the streets as fast or faster than the crappy ones do today.

Mixerman, those are round numbers. I don’t know anyone that pays $12-14 for a cd today, I just bought the new Institute CD for $11 at Sam Goody, using that as a gauge those numbers still hold up.

The minimum wage is low, I agree, but I know I have never worked for minimum wage, even as a 15 year old. Now you get down to a discussion about disire and motivation, work ethic, the desire to acheive, etc… anyway you slice it, the cost of music today has only slightly changed over the last 25 years. Look at the gas, milk, or pretty much anything during that same period.

James, if you can’t get past the morally/legally right or wrong concept behind stealing, then obviously you can’t understand the other points I am making, since that is the basis for all of them. We will have to agree to disagree.

This is the core of your inability to understand the P2P situation from a real-world perspective. Not only are you unable to conceptualize the differences in people’s lives, you actually seem to be implying that some set of character traits make you better than others. You’re not myopic, you’re downright blind.

“James, if you can’t get past the morally/legally right or wrong concept behind stealing, then obviously you can’t understand the other points I am making, since that is the basis for all of them.”

I have absolutely no problem understanding right or wrong and, considering your “socialism” statements, you have very little reason to pontificate. I notice that moral issues generally crop up for the wealthy when it involves losing money but then it’s “just business” when they profit from someone else’s exploitation. Do you intend to champion the many artists past and present that were fleeced by record companies and left penniless? Oh that’s right, that was “just business.” But now it’s “theft” when the shoe is on the other foot. I’ve heard of choosing your battles but don’t you think that’s just a tad hypocritical?

Whether it is right or wrong, legal or illegal is moot… it’s going to keep happening. Since we are living in your dream world, shouldn’t the legal system be used for justice and not be whored for business purposes? But we’re NOT living in that world are we? To you, it’s a black and white issue, to me I don’t think thievery has suddenly become a world-wide movement. Everyone using P2P doesn’t have a malevolent need to rip someone off.

“TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom.”

Never underestimate the laziness of the public.

I don’t understand how the argument can go any further than that. Now if you understand that, then you can get into the argument that the record industry is ripping people off/not distributing content in the fashion that the public wants it, but that argument comes after, not before.

How can you compare plain and simple theft (stealing content online) with the contractual obligations that two parties knowingly and agreeably entered into? There is no comparison there. Many people sign bad contracts in all walks of business, whether it is music, software, services, etc. You have to ride it out and learn from your mistakes. It happens constantly in life, and you either learn from history or you are damned to repeat it. How many times does someone have to touch a hot stove?

No musician has ever been forced to sign a deal with a major record label, they have choosen to. If you blindly sign a bad deal, you have to deal with it, the opposite is true for the Mariah Careys of the world who have fleeced the record labels.

The “device” you refer to will still have to output a signal to a TV, which can easily be captured by a number of recording devices.

The record companies should not be behind this move at all, it makes them look bad. And as for you comment on Artists of the world will cheer is wrong. Artists are not the ones being affected by piracy, they have always had crappy contracts from labels. The people that get hurt by this, are lower level workers, shipers, recievers, packaging, designers, loaders, you know, the expendable people that make lower wages.
You will not see Madonna fired over piracy, nor will you see the head of MGM lose his job over it. All they want is to make more money and it is sickening.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Sorry Mark! Your a great guy, but I still struggle by)
I chose Piracy as the topic for my first documentary because of some of these issues. Hopefully some of you check out the trailer!

servant5150
Hookah Forum

servant5150
http://hookahForum.com

Where was the record company’s morals or ethics in those bad contracts? So because they COULD fleece those artists they SHOULD have? Man, you are ridiculous. It’s clear cut when someone steals a file but not clear cut when someone does something that is CLEARLY wrong ethically, such as knowingly taking advantage of someone else’s ignorance? You’re a real piece of work.

You can’t have it both ways but I guess you are determined to. It’s attitudes like yours that make P2P file sharers completely unsympathetic to the arguments of the record company. Your hypocrisy does more damage to your arguments than anything else.

As for my device, of course the signal could be copied but at least you’d have economies of scale on your side. As commodity pricing for the devices kicked in, their ubiquity would ultimately MARGINALIZE file sharing. You can only get one movie at a time when you steal them but what if you could buy a device that allowed you to get THOUSANDS of movies for 4 or 5 bucks apiece for $100-$150? That’ll eliminate A LOT of casual piracy. Maybe you don’t agree, but then most people are just thieves waiting to happen anyway, right? It’s cool, you’re not obligated to like my concept. But it’s cynicism like yours that is helping to stifle innovation as well.

Let me explain something simple. If you have something that someone else wants, they can take what you are offering for a price, go elsewhere, or make it themselves. Microsoft has the OS that all of the big OEMs want, and they pay MS for it. They could go to Linux, but the downside to the average user far outweighs the cost of Windows. Supply and demand is the biggest determination of cost.

You talk about how you are a successful business person, yet you don’t understand the benefits of leveraging your position? I guess successful is subjective.

BTW, your device is called a sat/cable box, someone must have stolen that idea from you 10 years ago, there goes another one.