Illegal Downloading

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Shuko

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We're all guilty of it. We've all done it. But how many of us actually stop to think about how bad it really is?

Of course not. If you do that, then you can't rationalize to yourself that it's okay, since you can't afford it all anyway, and you're not selling anything. If you think about all the people who lose their jobs year after year due to declining sales, and about all the outsourcing of technical jobs that's happening for the same reason, then perhaps you wouldn't feel as comfortable opening Limewire and getting that next Pokemon episode.

But it IS wrong. And it IS stealing. It's not a victimless crime. The people of this country are slowly screwing themselves over, driving prices higher and higher for products like DVDs, CDs, and computer software. Those companies that don't raise their prices simply lay people off, or they outsource to countries like India and China, where the labor rate is cheaper, and the human rights laws are less powerful.

What gets me is how so many people (kids and adults alike) rationalize it to themselves that it's not really stealing, and that it's the companies' fault for being unreasonable with their prices. Suddenly charging money for goods and services has become unreasonable? What happened to the days where if you didn't have enough money for something, you simply did without until you could make more? Are we that spoiled that we have to have everything or we're worth nothing? Come ON, people!

I want to hear what you think about this. Is illegal downloading right or wrong? Feel free to post examples and take the middle ground if you want, but I'd prefer a decisive answer, lol.
 
At the same time, downloading is done to compensate for products that aren't otherwise available. Like with the Pokemon example you just gave. You can't buy raw or subbed DVDs legitimately in America, so downloading is the only real option if that's how you choose to watch them. Or, in my case, I love J-Rock, but sadly, it's not gotten to the point where I can freely walk into Borders or FYE and pick up a CD of a band I like. I mean, good luck finding a Malice Mizer CD at the local music store. I do have standards- I won't download music by independent bands, for example, unless it's offered free on their own website- but sometimes, you have no choice but to download.
 
Neku said:
At the same time, downloading is done to compensate for products that aren't otherwise available. Like with the Pokemon example you just gave. You can't buy raw or subbed DVDs legitimately in America, so downloading is the only real option if that's how you choose to watch them. Or, in my case, I love J-Rock, but sadly, it's not gotten to the point where I can freely walk into Borders or FYE and pick up a CD of a band I like. I mean, good luck finding a Malice Mizer CD at the local music store. I do have standards- I won't download music by independent bands, for example, unless it's offered free on their own website- but sometimes, you have no choice but to download.
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Unfortunately, this is the biggest thing for me too. :p I'm just as guilty as you are. I never said I wasn't a hypocrite, lol. I'm just saying that it's wrong to steal like that. ;)

At the very least, when there IS a legal option, in most cases it's the ethical one too. It's something to think about, at least.
 
I think the case could also be made, however, that if the powers that be aren't giving the public what they want, why should they deserve our money?

Downloading's a pretty big moral gray area, when you think about it.
 
This is a cool topic Shuko!

I'm in a similar position as Neku, I do download music and Anime, but there is a catch:
For Anime it's not really as excusable. Sometimes I would DL a few eppisodes of a show I've never seen or watched before to see if I like it, and then I rebuy it if I like it when it comes to the US... That is, unless it's too long. With series like Pokemon and Naruto, I can't see myself buying the whole series ever.. Though I will say the companies don't go without any return from me, I'll watch their American versions too, so the money from advertising goes somewhere.

However for music, I download music to actually buy more music. Like Neku (and you too, I guess) I listen almost exclusively to Japanese music. Unfortunately I don't get Japanese MTV (though it'd be cool for cable companies to do things like that) and what ever Japanese radio station that does play, plays Japanese music popular in America (which is usually old Anime music...), so I don't really get to listen to new groups for what I like unless I download, or listen to a five-sec clip on a website. It gets even harder to do that with indy music.

So I'll download to get into new artist. I have a ton of Japanese CDs, and the method of downloading CDs as samples could grow a band's popularity like Anime does. (It must have done that with Ellegarden because they were nobodies in the US a few years ago)

Technically I defend it by saying that most CDs I purcase say not for sale, rent, or USE outside of Japan. So technically I'm out of their data in the first place, throwing off sales information anyways.

Personally, I don't see how people who download domestic CDs have a right to complain about pricing, US CDs are generally dirt cheap. It's not even funny how cheap it is. When ever I buy a Japanese CD it's always around $30 because of how much prices are inflated for those kinds of disk media (games and DVDs too).

Though, regardless of all of this, it bugs me when people illegally download games. (admittedly I'm more tolerant to people doing that with imported titles)
 
I weekly download Yugioh and Pokemon episodes, yet I erase them after I watch them and always watch the dubs/buy cards/buy games/ ect...

So, I don't feel as unclean...or something...
 
I totally agree with Shuko's first post. I as well have the feeling that nowadays many people think everything should be free.

And I have to disagree with you guys who say they download CDs because they can't get them at their local stores. There ARE ways to get Japanese CDs or any other stuff that is usually unavailable to one. Imports from asia have become a big business on the internet. So please stop saying that you download stuff because it's not sold in your country. For most cases that's no excuse as there are other possibilities to get the stuff.

I have to admit, I'm not completely 'clean' either. I agree, downloads are often an ethical gray zone. Even though I don't download really commercially available things like DVDs and CDs, I consider it okay to download TV captures as this doesn't really harm the owners in terms of money.
 
nYoo said:
I have to admit, I'm not completely 'clean' either. I agree, downloads are often an ethical gray zone. Even though I don't download really commercially available things like DVDs and CDs, I consider it okay to download TV captures as this doesn't really harm the owners in terms of money.
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Quoted for truth, I would say this paragraph applies to me quite a bit as well. I am careful with what I download and don't download too much stuff that's illegal.
 
I download whatever I can't buy, either because I simply can't afford it (yes, I'm spoiled), or I don't have a credit card to IMPORT FROM THE MOTHERLAND.


: (
 
same here if i cant buy it i download it
i dont feel guilty at all
 
Sorry nYoo, but I disagree.

If a company can't be assed to reasonably distribute their products (ie, make them available here without having to order from oversea or that sort of crap), I absolutely refuse to waste my time and money on oversea orders. If they wanted me to buy their product, they'd make it available in my market. End of story.

But 99.9% of the North American music pieces I own ; I (or someone in my house) owns the matching CD. The same goes for anime episodes, and so forth. If they're reasonably available here, I have them, or will get them.

And I do not have any downloaded or copied games, either.
 
What's the difference between downloading an anime episode and recording it from the television (assuming it's shown on TV)? Unless you have one of those Nielsen boxes, you're not affecting the ratings by not watching it when it airs. Or how about taping a song (as has been done for decades) compared with downloading it "illegally"? Either way, you're not buying the CD.

I see the illegality in downloading an entire album but, really, how does it harm the music industry for someone, or MILLIONS of someones, to download a song that's readily available on the radio? I see the illegality in downloading an entire season's worth of episodes. But how does it harm the various DVD companies to download a single episode?

The example that's always raised are these people with huge catalogs of songs or movies, but honestly...what percentage of the population is that? Is it even one percent? Is it even one percent of the potential buying audience for any single product? I've never seen ANY figures for EITHER side of the debate. Just "people are losing jobs" and "it doesn't hurt anyone." Gotta say, I'd love to see something that WASN'T from the RIAA or an international equivalent.
 
For that matter, what's the difference between buying a book, downloading a copy of it, or getting it from the library, to add to GrnMarvel's examples.
 
Arguing about downloading and the music industry is just complete and utter lolz, considering the RIAA steals a lot more from artists than anyone downloading MP3s does.

I download Pokemon episodes and some MP3s, for the Pokemon episodes, I pretty much download them because they simply are not available here. Even the dub requires me to go out and buy a Digital/Satellite subscription to get Toonami (or before that, Sky) - and that doesn't even air the latest episodes.

Concerning that point, the world is now a completely global market. The internet has connected us in a way completely unimaginable even just a decade agp. Unfortunately, the entire entertainment industry - along with many others - do not yet understand that, or the importance of it. And nowhere can you experience this fact more than in Europe and the UK. The UK especially so - where we speak the same language as America, we have even been adapted into adopting parts of their culture, and yet we have to wait around for months for the album/movie/game that our American cousins are busy enjoying.

It's hardly a fair system/market at all - and though the EU especially hasn't helped matters with stupid laws concerning languages (mostly stemmed from the Germans controlling the entire Union) - the entire entertainment industry has done almost nothing to rectify it either.

If they can't release their product in a timely manner, or in some cases, at all, then they're hardly able to complain that someone took the easier and quicker route of simply downloading it.
 
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The best thing you can do for a band is to go to a concert, buy some merchandise, and have some beers. THAT goes to the bands more then CD sales. I have probably 500+ records in my collection, and tons of cd's and cassettes... I have purchased a lot of music over the years, and continue to do so... but I also download a lot of music, and I rip cd's and records out of my own collection for sharing... I am not going to try to justify it, it's just what I do. I have probably over 80gb of music on my harddrive... and more on backup dvd's. Yeah, I do it. Yeah, it's illegal, but yeah, I give money to bands that I really like and try to buy what I have downloaded whenever possible.
 
If it makes anyone feel better, I have this grand plan one day to replace every song in my 2000+ collection with songs that have been bought from the artist's site.



Someday.
 
I think a lot of people who download the songs wouldn't bother to buy the CDs from the store even if they couldn't download them. Like me. I used to pirate music all the time, but now I'm behind a firewall. I can't do it anymore, and there are songs I want - but not enough to actually go out and buy. For various reasons - music isn't that important to me, buying a CD involves buying a lot of songs you don't like, usually, they feel overpriced, they're large and relatively hard to store if you like a lot of music, you have to sort through them to use them, one song may be not be an accurate reflection of a band's talent - all the other ones may suck, buying singles seems like a waste of physical space to own a CD with two songs on it . . . etc.
 
I don't know Satoshi, if a concert is over $50 and it's basically one big band, the money is probably not going to the artist. It's probably filtering through the record label as much as a large record company CD is.

nYoo said:
I totally agree with Shuko's first post. I as well have the feeling that nowadays many people think everything should be free.

And I have to disagree with you guys who say they download CDs because they can't get them at their local stores. There ARE ways to get Japanese CDs or any other stuff that is usually unavailable to one. Imports from asia have become a big business on the internet. So please stop saying that you download stuff because it's not sold in your country. For most cases that's no excuse as there are other possibilities to get the stuff.
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That still doesn't work. What kind of sane person likes to waste $40 (because of shipping too) on one CD from an artist they've never heard of? For Domestic music there is MTV, Radio, and tons of other methods to hear the artist. For Japanese music people have anime, and websites like Sony's with song samples (most record label sites don't even have samples by the way). There is a lot more than anime, and if another claim is internet radio, it too falls in the trap of being Anime. (most internet radio channels for Japanese music I can think of will play old Anime theme songs, like Ranma 1/2, and Ayumi songs)

It's not as easy to get into as you think, and it's especially not easy if you are getting into more Indy music.
 
I hope this topic is still going in a weeks time, so I can make a real answer without having to worry about time being taken away from my studies, but I would just like to mention one thing. In the business studies I've done as part of my undergraduate and now post-graduate degrees, the issue of piracy has come up repeatedly, and the message that generally comes out is that, yes, piracy is an issue, but there are also potential upsides in your marketing equation from your product being pirated and counterfeited. Depending on your industry, the argument that piracy doesn't even hurt you, given that these people would otherwise have never purchased your product, but now that they've got it for (next to) nothing, can act as word-of-mouth promoters for it (and related merchandise, again depending on industry), is recognised and acknowledged amongst academics.
 
I only download stuff which I can not get here in the UK...

I also started download some stuff I can get in the UK if I had Sky Digital - because Sky stopped broadcasting Sky One on virgin media...(I only had two months left in this house...so it isn't worth the money.)

I mostly download American TV shows (lost, heroes, how I met your mother, battlestar galactica.) but I also download Fansubbed anime.

I actually buy the DVDs of most of the shows I watch (I am waiting till after my exams to get HIMYM DVDs...and I will be buying Heroes on "opening day."

like one of the series I have all the DVDs for is Family guy...but I am currently downloading the episodes from USA each week.

I find the American TV schedule announcements as interesting as Americans do. (Can't wait for the Bionic Woman.)
 
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