Subj : Question
To   : Ralph Smole
From : Sam Alexander
Date : Fri Sep 23 2005 05:48 pm

  Re: Question
  By: Ralph Smole to Melkor on Fri Sep 23 2005 06:00 pm

 >   Re: Question
 >   By: Melkor to Sniper on Fri Sep 23 2005 01:35 am
 > 
 >  >
 >  >  > I've looked at Bearshare, and Limewire... not too impressed.  What els
 >  >  > there worth looking at?
 >  > Ive had pretty good luck with warezp2p myself..
 >  >
 >  >
 >  > ...Computers run on faith, not electrons.
 >  > Join StarNet today.. Http://starfrontiers.dyndns.org
 >  >
 >  >
 > 
 > I've had better luck either: (1) Burglarizing private residences and helping
 > myself to their music collection, (2) Shoplifting music from stores, (3)
 > Assaulting people and stealing their IPOD's,etc...It's all the same as P2P.
 > 

Though I don't download or share music, I don't think the analogy of 
"downloading music is like stealing it from the store" is at all correct.  

Stealing IMO is when you take something and deprive the original owner of 
profit from that specific item.  If someone gives someone else a copy of a 
CD or someone downloads TONS of music from the web, they aren't depriving 
that original owner of anything.  It can be argued that it's depriving the 
music company of potential profit since the person who downloaded the song 
now has a copy without paying for it -- but that only holds true if the 
person planned on paying for it to begin with, which most don't.  Someone 
who has 6000 songs had zero intention of buying any of those, so where's the 
potential profit????  

Most folks nowdays who have LARGE MP3 collections listen to a very small 
amount of it.  THey downloaded what they have because it was there... not 
because they thought "Ohh, lets download it instead of buying it".  By them 
downloading that music they're not at all depriving the industry out of 
profit because they wouldn't have bought all that music anyway.  

I do see this quite abit different with software because if someone takes 
the time to download Windows XP, MS Office, OSX Tiger, etc they're doing it 
with the full intent on using it, and probably using it quite often.  I can 
see the 'deprived profit' maybe holding true here since who's going to 
download an 800 meg program and let it just sit there... but 2-3 meg MP3s?  
RIAA needs to find something better to do.

Sam



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