Cost of hi def / res tracks

My view is once you've paid for a particular piece of music you are entitled to a copy of it. You handed the music industry, the band, the recording company your 10 quid and until they refund that 10 quid, a copy of that music should be yours. It's irrelevant if someone gives me 5 quid for my CD somewhere down the line.  I still gave my 10 quid in the first place.

The music suits obviously want a situation where the rights to a piece of music is sold with the physical copy and are looking for loop holes to ensure that only the holder of the physical media (CD, Vinyl) can have a copy.  So they're saying if the original purchaser of a CD for example has a digital copy, if he sells the CD he must destroy the copy. The new owner of the CD can then make a copy.

There's no doubt the music execs (and movie execs) spin a pile of bull manure about money they are 'losing' either by people downloading or selling their collections on to others but there's no evidence people would buy, at new prices, what they're downloading so the execs numbers are massively over inflated for dramatic effect.

Frankly, the suits can suck my balls.

It doesn't work like that. You have sold your right to keep it and any copies and you are not required to give a proportion of what you got for it to the artist or label. You can't have it both ways but you can have it another way, if you buy second hand. 

If a CD changes hands multiple times and each seller keeps a copy, that's depriving the artist significantly, although I have no sympathy for the labels, well not the major ones. It's still stealing though, sympathy or not.

You own the physical medium, and can sell it. You are not allowed to make a copy without permission. There is an exception for keeping a backup digital copy. It is like not being allowed to sell photocopies of a Tracy Emin drawing.

In some countries there is a droit de suite - when you sell the physical medium -i.e. you have to give the artist a percentage. I quite like that system.

When I was a teenager in the late 1970's, I actually sat down and wrote a letter to Capitol Records in Hollywood asking for permission to transfer all my Beatles LPs to tape for the purpose of listening to them in my car. I included the title and catalog number of each LP I owned. Their written response was no, I was not allowed to make copies for myself.

That was almost 35 years ago. Of course that did not stop me from making said copies. I still have and use all the LPs but the tapes are long gone in some landfill.

Yes. That sounds nice, particularly if it's going to the artist.

Nice story, do you still have their letter? If so I'd love to see a scan of it. 

SJB

In those terms, I argue it should be illegal to resell a CD. 90% of the music out there is disposable. By that I mean, there's only so many times you can hear it before you've lost interest. Think of it as a consumable.

Since the artist of the label sees no revenues from it on a second or subsequent sale, you've deprived the artist of their fair share by buying or selling s/h CDs. 

In fact, a more fair way of doing this is putting a limit on the number of times you can listen to any CD. Once you've heard a CD say a 100 times, you lose your license. With digital downloads, all that will become possible, and I welcome that day.

By that logic - all the craps CDs you buy and don't get through even once (I've got plenty of those) will cost me next to nothing. And Graceland (Oh god! I hate that album now) will end up costing me a few hundred, because it's be listened to 3 times a day every single day since two years now.

Come to think of it, the future is here - spotify has a similar business model.

Music labels would do well to stop manufacturing CDs altogether. Only issue is, Crap DRMd downloads will still cost me a minimum of say $20 anyway.

So, how does your sense of morality and legality react with this possible future? 

Or maybe I'm on the wrong forum - all I can expect here is stodgy protection of status Quo....

I may still have the letter, buried of course. It was part of a school assignment writing different styles of letters. I wrote one to President Jimmy Carter at the same time, and I know I kept the response from the White House. I'll have to look. I've got a scanner.

Dear MM,

You really do write some squit.

Once a person buys a CD,  he or she has the right to listen to it so long as he or she still owns it.

Give away or sell it then the right is lost.

Give it away or sell it and listening to a copy is illegal.

Thus when a person sells the CD he or she must delete any copies.

It's not rocket science ...

ATB from George

You and I, dear sir, have very different listening habits and views of the music each of us buys. I've stated here before that I still own music on vinyl from my youth as well as nearly every CD I've ever bought. I've never resold any of it, although I may have donated some unwanted CDs to the thrift shop. I don't buy music until I'm pretty certain I'm going to like it, and once I do I keep it. My collection is not huge and so I can visit most of it on an annual basis.

George, if you read closely, I wasn't educating anyone on the law as it stands today - only a suggested modification of the law - a controversial suggestion I'm putting forward to generate some discussion.

Why would you think my suggested modification of the law is worse, better or more/less unfair than the current laws - if technology can support it, and it is automatically enforceable.

Arggh.. is everyone's imagination here so narrow and sterile? 

And as one of my physicist friends told me - he doesn't understand why people keep saying "rocket science". There's really nothing that complicated about shooting a rocket up into the air.

I'm taking about the public at large - you should look at the top selling records the last 10 years, and tell me whether you think any of that music has lasting power.

My music collection is rather largely skewed towards the previous millennium. 

To generate some more controversy - 

If a piece of music is out of print - An argument could me made that the labels see no way to profit from it, and the artist will see no more money from that CDs sales anymore. For those class of CDs, why would it be wrong to keep a copy of the CD, (a CD Rip) and sell the CD on. It would keep a business afloat, and give more people access to the music. In fact, I would think that hoarding on to it would be the wrong thing to do morally.

(Legally - yes, I get it guys, move on..)

Yes, you would be one of the ones negatively impacted by the rewrite of the law. :-)

Now that's interesting. Not from any legal/rights perspective but as an illustration of how different people live with their collections. I tend to stick quite a lot. Some of what I still listen to, appreciate and enjoy today I was enjoying up to 40 years ago. There have been periods when I have gone off an artist or an album, only to rediscover it and sometimes appreciate it more years later. A part of this is related to the equipment used. After about 10 years of not listening to my collection much at home, although still in the car, a Naim CD5 reinvigorated my interest in recorded music and made me realise what I had been missing.

On the flip side, I can think of a lot of disposable (to me) output which has grabbed my attention for a relatively short period but again, whilst some of it has been disposed of, some of it comes round again. I'm sure the industry would love it if I disposed of what I didn't currently listen to and then bought some of it again. To me it's like storing photographic negatives (or nowadays RAW files). I hardly ever chuck out anything I've gone to the trouble of obtaining, even if I study a small cross section of it at a time. You just never know what you might end up going back to. 

If a system was introduced that, for example, dictated that after 100 plays an album was extant, I and many would become very committed law breakers. Not that it would ever stand up in court.

My logic suggests the opposite. Keeping a free copy of something you have sold can't keep a business afloat because if you sell something once and people make copies the artist/label will only ever have the proceeds of one sale off many uses. That's more likely to sink a business.

If something is flavour of the fashion month, on closer analysis actually turns out to be crap, and gets heaved out, you tend to end up with thousands (maybe more) of second hand items going for £0.01 and this is often richly deserved, although more fool the sheep who rushed out and bought it because everyone else was.

Conversely, something which is well regarded, even by a small cross section of fans, may appreciate considerably in value because of short supply. The pity here is that when something that retailed for £10 changes hands for multiples more, the artist doesn't get a crumb. I would like to see this addressed in the UK.

Controversy, probably not. Bemusement, mild irritation, or despair, probably.

I can see where you're coming from, but I cannot see how it could be done...

I assume that you are talking about future sales of CDs having a restricted life?

Otherwise this would be retrospective legislation, which is always "bad" law.

I cannot really support your notion that restricting the number of plays a purchaser may have from a CD is a useful thing from the customer perspective, and will simply lead to customers for CDs who were previously not criminal, taking actions to crack the play-limit.

As I said before, "You really do write some ...!"

As for rocket science as anyone with a decent adduction in physics knows, rocket science is not such a complex subject, so to suggest something is simpler than rocket science means it really is very simple indeed!

ATB from George

Dear MM,

If Mangomonkey's Lawf were never to apply to CDs, then it would simply ensure that CDs did not die out!

ATB from George

The thing about seeming to earn good money from apparently not doing much is that if it really was that easy we'd all be doing it. TBH I don't think there's anything novel or left field about envy. Maybe this is also an age thing, I don't know. What I do know is that after all the toil  over the years, I should bloody well hope I have got something long lasting to show for it. Otherwise what's the point? If someone else had pulled all the muscles while I went for the line of least resistance, why shouldn't they have more to show for it?