But Volbeat is pretty awesome.

Love’s uncles stole (should I post it here?) ‘Surf City USA’ from Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little 16’. They did lose in court.

the operators of that site made millions of dollars at the expense of Metalica

That’s the industry’s math. They insist that every stolen copy is a purchase they were robbed of when the truth is 90%+ of those filesharers would have never paid $17 for a Metallica CD. Hell, I downloaded their collaboration with Lou Reed just to say I did and then threw it in the trash.

Studies show what my friends have already proven to me: the biggest downloaders almost always have the biggest bought and paid for music collections.

Um. Did you even read what I wrote above about Napster?

Here it is for you again.

I hate Metallica for shutting down Napster……and not for anti-piracy reasons – for business reasons! They had a conduit to touch over 25 million music enthusiasts…. and instead of working within legal bounds to reach some compromise, they shut it down. So fucking dumb. The consumers scattered to the winds (grokster, gnutella, freenet, kazaa, limewire, audiogalaxy, bearshare, etc…) and a huge leveraging opportunity was lost – without significant recoupment of revenue, mind you. Rockstars need to stick to music. I’m talking to you Dave Navarro.

Not a whole lot of sword falling or claims of altruism going on there….

1. This is exactly my point, the fair use doctrine is not a bright line rule where a potential infringer can know with certainty whether their use is fair use. It’s a blancing test of many factors.

2. Never argued that they did, but like stated in regards to number 1, copyright law is not a certainty for everything. Now, if someone uploads an entire episode of the Simpsons to Youtube, while that’s certainly not fair use, but that type of content isn’t appearing on YouTube for that very reason.

3. Due process is a huge problem because essentially your giving a non-court non government agency the right to determine rights. Removing content prior to adjudication essentially makes all content removable, slippery slope.

And now to the main point in regards to Number 4. Copyright holders want the best of both worlds with no sacrifies. They want a medium to sell their product that anybody can use to play it, in terms of music, but they want to be able to control the medium so that no one they did not license their product to can use it. The dichotomy becomes, create a music file that is so secure that equipment needed to play the file becomes more expensive, and therefore, only adopted by a few. Or create a music file that anyone can play, increasing your potential customer base, but is easily pirated by others.

The powers that be in the music industry gambled on the second option, but in reality, didn’t acknowledge the market realities, and lost big time. It took someone outside the industry, Apple, to develop a more secure music file that is more expensive to play, for them to see they made the wrong choice.

Now, because they no longer control the physical medium on which their product resides, and because they made terrible business decisions in losing that control, we all must give the government the right to shut down any webiste that even mentions file sharing. Fuck that and Fuck them. Apple is making tons of money, bands are still making money playing live shows, the only people losing money are the free loading producers who had their niche in the market replaced by Apple. Yes, you can point to statistics that tell me that the music industry sales are down, and theirfore the bands are losing money off album sales, but smart bands are able to cut out the middle man and make more per song even if they are selling less songs, because they no longer have expenses related to distribution.

I am not arguing that stealing copyrighted music is a birthright, what I am arguing is that Copyright producers, i.e. the music industry, needs to take back control of the product it produces and deal with a more limited secure market, which Apple has already has done to some extent, and retrain a generation of consumers it already shit the bed in enabling them to steal their own product.