Now CD less...

I assume this means you have never purchased a used LP or CD without immediately posting a check to the publishing house for royalty prior to the first needle drop or pressing play?

As I said above, I'm just as guilty on the other end of the scheme by buying said used CD. Except in my case it's perfectly legal and I'm protected by the law because I have the physical copy. Still, the musicians receive no royalty. I guess if the law had the full purpose of protecting royalties, it would make illegal the sale of second hand music media. But the government gets their tax on that revenue, don't they?

Buying a second hand LP or CD is no moral or legal problem. It has been paid for and in doing so the right to listen to copyright material is secured. Obtaining a rip from a CD that you do not own or have sold or disposed of is theft and is rightly illegal.

If you buy a car you are free to sell it and therefore no longer have the use of it. Equally, you can buy a second hand car, and so have the legal use of it.

Thus it will be clear that there is no reason to make a payment to the copyright holder when trading a used LP or CD in the same way as not making a payment to the car manufacturer when you buy a second hand car.

However it may be of interest to you to know that the number of second hand LPs and CDs that I have owned over the last forty five years could be counted on the fingers of two hands out of, currently, about 600 CDs, and no LPs anymore. I could list the lot for you if you are interested. Just ask if you are interested. 

 Your interpretation of my post is misguided, whether this is wilful or accidental.

ATB from George

Dear Joe, 

It is quite fair for you to use a second hand CD, because the physical possession of the disc confers the legal right to listen to the music it carries. The reason that the artist is not deprived is that the first owner should no longer be listening to the music on that disc. That is why retaining a copy when the original is disposed of is illegal. If it were wrong to trade second hand recordings, then it would be just as logical to limit the number of times a person could listen to a recording they have bought. Say ten playings and then be forced to buy it again for example!

As long as the physical item is exists then possession confers the legal right to use it.

ATB from George

Perhaps the libraries pay some royalties to the record labels or artists funds so that you, the user, may copy a CD without breaking the law.

Or, if the musicians are public employees, like in many orchestras, one might argue that the musicians already get paid by your taxes so that you can copy radio broadcasts e.g.

But in general musicians in all countries prefer to be paid for their work and it's better not to unilaterally make assumptions to your own advantage.

George,

Your reply to me makes me feel a bit better, at least from a legal principle. Frankly, the copyright issue was something I never gave much consideration to until about a decade ago. At that time I made acquaintance (friend of a friend) with an artist that had just cut her first album. She was "struggling" at the time and I bought her CD out of curiosity. Turns out I liked it a lot. My wife also liked it and wanted to rip a copy to play in her car. I said "Why don't we just buy a second CD and help out our friend".  A nice idea and my wife and I both felt better for it. The album turned out to be a Number 1 on the US Folk chart. That artist just released her sixth album and it is a Number 1 on both the US Folk and Rock charts. My wife and I continue to buy our own personal copy of her releases. Nice to think that in some very, very small part we've helped a friend on her way to success, and given her her hard-earned royalties.

Following up, I also think the recording industry made a poor decision decades ago when they opted not to copy-protect CDs. The industry shot themselves in the foot, but may as well have shot struggling artists in the bread basket.

Many kids today are content to get their music via software that rips MP3s from YouTube videos. I'll bet most of these kids have no notion of royalties associated with legitimate downloads. Just getting "free music".

Well, when CDs were invented there were no PCs nor CD writers around and the storage capacity of hard disks measured in megabytes. Compared to this the capacity of optical media was incredibly large and one could not imagine that one would ever be able to copy an entire library of CDs to a hard disk.

My recollection is that there was a critical decision made by the industry at the time not to copy-protect CDs, perhaps with some future-proofing in mind and based on the copying of a single CD (i.e., to be passed among friends). I believe the technology to copy a single CD then existed, but I could be wrong.

Quite so. Although you could have copied your CDs to cassettes, kept the copy and sold or given away the CDs. Which would have been breaking the law. You have always been able to make as many copies as you like and lend material out (in the UK) but as soon as you dispose of the original you cannot own a copy of something you don't have. It's very simple and let he/she who is 100% guilt free their whole life sling the first rock.

I've counted my albums of dubious origin and I'm 92% guilt free. Where does this put me relative to the average guilt level?

I'd be careful. If you're 92% guilt free, the chance of getting caught is about one in a million. According to the Ephebian philosophers, the likelihood of a chance of exactly one in a million occurring is nine times out of ten.

EJ

Here's where we are in disagreement. Making music (or any other activity) can only be considered "work" if others are prepared to pay you for doing it. Just like sportspeople, the vast majority of musicians receive no payment whatsoever and simply do it for the love of it. The professionals are the anomaly. Whilst effort and cost goes into making the recording in the first place, the incremental cost of making copies of those recordings is approximately zero. I would argue that recorded music should simply be considered a marketing tool for the live performances that have true cost in every instance. Copies of the recordings should be provided at the cost of making those copies (~0) (plus a margin for the distributor, I guess). The business is perhaps shifting in this direction as effective control of copies of recorded music is essentially non-existent.

If you're a musician, can't sit back and live off royalties and don't like how hard you have to work by touring, then fine, don't. Get a real job.

(Disclaimer - I pay for all my music. Nice and legal-like. I don't necessarily agree, but I also don't break laws - except rolling through stop signs on my bike)

Dear Winki,

I have never felt that I could cherry pick which laws I choose to obey. I am not suggesting that you do either.

As you probably know, I no longer play music because of a repetitive strain injury in my left hand. This was only a problem from playing so I decided to accept that my playing was over. 

That is the back-ground. Over the years there have been some wonderful commercial recordings of great artists playing the greatest of music. We have the chance to listen to today's musicians and musicians from the last hundred year and more. We are culturally richer because of this ...

If there had been a free-for-all on copying then these recordings would never have been made, and we would be the worse off culturally if that had happened. 

I agree that musical performance is often given for nothing by amateurs, but those whose vocation is to be a professional musician does not devalue the significance of their work in comparison to those doing other work for a living. Of course there are jobs that are clearly more valuable, such as doctors and teachers. But there are many whose livelihood seems to have much less benign results. 

ATB from George

Just my opinion - if you've paid full price for a CD and then re-sell it to a secondhand store or charity shop for pennies on the dollar, the record company (and artist by loose extension) has already been paid (once). You no longer have rights to the physical media itself, including the booklet, the packaging, etc.

The problem arises when that same CD is resold at $1 and the artist does not get paid (again) at the same level; the same applies to LP records, cassettes, etc. It's the conundrum of tying royalties to sales of physical media: it may cover the costs, and provide some royalties to artists, but it's a dead-end game once content no longer requires a physical presence.

Today is Record Store Day, which is in and of itself an anachronism (in spite of the fact that I spent many years trawling the local used and new record bins) - we no longer need a commercial retail bricks-and-mortar storefront to purchase content, unless of course we absolutely desire the physical presence of playable media. For each, the manufacturing costs dominate the royalties and recording costs, given the smaller economy of scale.

So how does an artist make a living? By playing live gigs / concerts / one-off events, by developing a brand which supercedes the physical media to provide income streams from merchandising / licensing etc. This is the only way to do it, and may not be kind to those purists who believe that adulation is due those who perfect their art - but it's the same way every other art form survives.

Artists that play free gigs or create public, unpaid works of art are only hurting themselves - in the case of charity gigs, create an invoice for production costs and logistics, write off the parts that are intended as a donation (could be all), and establish a value to what you're giving away for tax purposes - no free gigs in commercial environments for "exposure", no public art for conspicuous consumption for free unless you are willing to accept the consequences of diluting your brand.

Let's stop worrying about pithy little moral arguments about ripping CDs to a music server - that's an utter waste of time and misses the larger point.

When commercial online music first became available.it had DRM I think. A bad mistake that has since been corrected.

They were lucky enough just to be able to get the data off the discs themselves in real-time! There would not have been enough processing power to address the issue of encryption, which came later with DVDs, SACD, etc.

The mistake, however, was the implicit lack of understanding that, by binding the content to the business model of selling physical media, they were setting themselves up for failure. There was no notion of copy protection with analogue media, other than generational loss.

Hats off to the BBC for figuring this model out early, in the guise of an all-you-can-consume TV license....

I was wondering when we were going to get the weak argument suggesting that recorded music should just be considered a marketing tool for live performance.

What about all of the other people involved other than the musicians?

I know artists that perform for free and depend on the sale of CDs to partially cover costs.

The law, such as it stands, is a complete nonsense by any practical definition.

Lets say your house is cleaned out by burglars whilst you're on holiday.  Those mothballed CD's you've kept in storage (instead of giving to charity) are stolen and end up being sold in a car boot sale.  The new owner bought in good faith and without knowledge or suspicion they were stolen, so the law (of contract) respects his ownership.

In so doing, does it declare you a criminal for not dutifully erasing your rips after the theft of originals ?

From another (moral/philosophical) angle, how can giving something away make you a thief ?

Artist rights to royalties in perpetuity are one moral/economic argument. Giving to charity is another.

Those charity shops that you are so fond of are actually businesses where the profits are spent on "doing good" instead of being shared by the owners. They are paying rent and employing staff as well as all of the other costs. Are they allowed to resell my stolen plasma TV?

I've been one of those "other people" - the tendency of recent has been to push for a percentage of the royalties on sales of the recording, though this is often hard to negotiate - in many instances, the production team falls into the same category of royalties as the artist (publishing royalties, mechanicals, etc.). Traditionally, the publishing royalties are the strongest, which is why many top producers insist on a co-writing credit.

I said it once and I'll say it again - performing for "free" for promotional purposes, as opposed to a written-off business model, is for idiots. You need the paper trail in order to justify your efforts from a charitable perspective, as well as to recover production costs for an in-store appearance, for example. Treat everything you do as a profit-or-loss exercise within the bounds of the tax laws and you'll soon find that this is a much better approach, and provides a degree of respect for the value of your efforts, now and in the future.

Actually Bananahead, in answer to your question those charity shops are quite entitled to re-sell your stolen plasma TV, yes.

Providing it was donated to them by that nice man round the corner (who moonlights as a burglar).