this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is “losing a sale” and not getting the money, right?
In theory, sharing a digital file can have a much greater impact than sharing a CD physically. Plus, you lose access to your copy of the CD if you give it to someone else. You can think of it like transferring a license for one user to a different user. There is no simultaneous usage.
I don’t personally agree with this view, but I believe that’s the argument.
I buy disc.
I rip contents of CD to computer.
I sell disc.
DON’T COPY THAT FLOPPY!!
This argument is only a “gotcha” if it was permissible use, but it wasn’t, even before CDs.
Not very fun fact: The developer from that video got arrested for cp possession
You’re totally right, that’s not fun at all!
You rather had them walk free? /S
The amount of people who will duplicate their tapes and CDs would be lower than the amount of people who will duplicate their digital files.
Most of the time when a law sounds silly for banning something when alternatives exist, it’s because people themselves are silly and don’t actually go for the alternatives at the same rate as they would the banned thing. Ie gun accessory bans, ninja star bans.
Where were you in the early 2000s? Lol
Burning CDs. That’s how I know most people didn’t know how to do it, or want to put in the effort. You had to go buy a stack of CDs, hope your computer supported burning, had to make sure players could support the burned disc (depending on if you made a music disc or data disc, if it was rewritable), and spend the time to burn the disc.
Contrast that to ctrl+c ctrl+v.
There’s more people who can ‘duplicate’ digital files than there were people burning CDs.
I don’t know anyone who didn’t do this.
Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is literally evidence of one (which disproves “zero” claims). Collections of anecdotal evidences make statistics making your dismissive statement dumb.
I’m adding to the pile. I can name literally over a dozen people in my childhood who copied Discs.
Of those three steps, step 2 is the illegal one. (Assuming we’re talking about music and not software.) Even if you never do step 3.
(Not saying things should be that way. Nor that it’s not difficult to enforce. Only that as the laws are today, even ripping a music CD to your hard drive without any intention to share the audio files or resell the CD, even if you never listen to the tracks from your computer, the act of making that “copy” infringes copyright.)
Edit: Oh, and I should mention this is the case for U.S. copyright. No idea about any other countries.
In the US, if you don’t proceed to step 3, step 2 is legal (so long as the CD lacks DRM). You’re permitted a single backup under fair use; you’re also permitted to rip the music for personal use, like loading it onto a music player. You’re not supposed to burn it to a regular CD-R (is it illegal? Idk), but burning it to an Audio CD-R (where there is a tax that is distributed to rights holders like royalties) is endorsed by the RIAA.
One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.
Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.
If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.
Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.
Physical media doesn’t have the luxury of endlessly replicating itself via a simple copy and paste.
