Bye bye, Pirate Bay

It's like Pandora's Box though. Little point in trying to fight this. Those who seek to control it will have to adapt.

I still say the whole "copyright infringement" thing is just a smokescreen. I..."acquire" a lot of music so that I can hear it without risking money on a bad purchase. If I think it's worth a shit, then I'll go drop some coin on a legal, higher-quality copy. That's what scares these industry folks. They want to get your money first, make you pay for the privilige of finding out that most of their products are complete shit.

Strange that you don't respect their intellectual property rights in this instance.

Arrrgghh mateys, we's be a shutting down!!!!

I believe I just explained that I do respect it. I take their car for a test drive, and if I like it I buy the fuckin' thing. If not, it goes back to the lot.

Except that's not the way it works with music. They haven't agreed to let you "test drive" their product by "acquiring" it in the way you do.

What's the difference between that and a free radio broadcast?

If libertarians start looking at intellectual property rights too closely they start realizing that they're an entirely artificial and largely arbitrary construct about which nothing is natural and which can not exist or be enforced without a government. Then they might even get an inkling of the notion that property rights more generally, while not as arbitrary and artificial as intellectual property rights, also contain constructed elements that don't derive from any articulable libertarian principle and that also can't exist or be enforced without a government. This makes their heads explode. Do you really want to be picking Uncle Albert brains out of the wordforge server?

The owners permission. You're the libertarian. You don't need me to explain it.

And once again, despite the innumerable times that it has been explained, you trot out the old strawman that "libertarianism means no government."

I have asked it before, and I will ask it again: Do you and others do this because you are actually incapable of grasping the concept of libertarianism, despite the impressive number of times it has been explained? Or do you do it even though you know that it is a strawman, because demonstrating the invalidity of anarchy is a task you feel up to but demonstrating the invalidity of libertarianism is not?

Not that it matters much either way; arguments about how governments are necessary, in order to show that libertarianism doesn't work, are as ineffective as arguments about the radiation belts that are supposed to prove that men never went to the moon. They might sound valid to those who don't know what they're talking about, but they have no effect whatsoever on those who actually understand the issue.

You are clearly in JohnM territory here, as far as the quality of logical argumentation is concerned.

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As I understand it, the "owner" is not overtly couching his complaints in "permission," but in the claim of lost profits. He wants my money, and if his product is worth a shit, he gets it. If I don't already know I like a movie or a few of the songs on a CD, I'm not going to risk money on it anyway, so they're not losing any money through my test driving their products. Not only that, but it ultimately results in me buying more of their products when I actually know what I'm getting.

Lost profits follow from acquiring without permission. One is a result of the other. You're still committing the same crime if you subsequently pay for some of what you've downloaded as if you just keep it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...f_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=467100013&pf_rd_i=77197031

They do let you test drive.

I'm still guilty of depriving them of profits after contributing to those profits? Don't even try to pawn the guilt for other peoples' actions off on me.

Once again, accepting for the sake of argument that this is all about the money, they stand to lose more by denying me of the ability to verify what I'm buying. And if that really turns out to be the case. If they would truly rather I not buy their product at all than find some way of adapting their business model to customers who won't make a purchase sight-unseen, then so fucking be it. The big labels can go under, and the artists can cut out the middle man.

I'm not defending their position, simply articulating it. I download myself, but unlike UA, I don't have an absolutist view of property rights.

Oh, I think those people understand the situation. They're faced with the prospect of diminishing returns on the continued recycling and repackaging of the same generic mass-market crapola, and they're hoping to blame someone other than themselves. So they gin up this bullshit argument against file-sharing when the real problem is their own incestuous, cannibalistic, obsolete way of doing business.

I seriously doubt any label executive could examine my behavior and claim with a straight face that I am part of the problem they're complaining about.

why not put ads in music?

Thank you for admitting that you are incapable of arguing the REAL topic and have to resort to inventing conditions and scenarios which you find much easier to disprove.

Which they are making whether I listen to the commercials or not.

And I don't, of course. Will someone now accuse me of stealing because I skip out on TV/Radio commercias?

Probably. Kind of like the argument against recording TV shows so that there are no commercial breaks.

Radio broadcasters pay for the music. You listening increases their advertising revenue.

Which is a steamling load of by itself. If I pay for cable/satellite, I fucking refuse to "pay" a second time by obediently watching commercials. No part of my service contract requires me to view advertisements, and how that gets sorted out with the networks and advertisers is not my goddamned problem.

Oh really? Can the broadcast station tell where my tuner is set from one moment to the next?

Your tuner specifically?

No.

These people, however, conduct surveys of radio listeners to determine who's listening to what.

So that's a "no." Unless I participate on some fucking survey (which I obviously do not), whether or not I listen to commercials has no bearing on anyone's profits.

Nope. It's all done with estimates.

Television at least has Nielsen boxes, but those ad rates are still based on estimates.