When I was a damn teenager, me and my friends were always heading to downtown Toronto to our favourite record store (The Record Peddler) to pick up the latest great music. We'd come home, listen and record our purchases to tape and then swap goods. Jesus & Mary Chain, New Order, New Model Army, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen etc. Although we never paid money for the collective borrowed records (which we would all tape) we never considered it piracy or that we were getting the music for free. It was just considered sharing and I don't ever recall hearing about the record companies freaking out about this.
I'm not really in touch with this DRM music thing and the record industry's beef with file-sharing and bit torrents and what not but WTF? In the 90's, half (if not more) of the CD's I purchased were bought used from various shops. Zulu Records on 4th had the best selection. The record industry (as far as I know) didn't cry rivers over the fact that little independent stores like Zulu were making money off of selling used CD's or that I was reselling some CD's and making some money for myself and the record labels and musicians weren't making a cent. I know people who never bought new CD's, buying only used so if the industry is up in arms about people getting music for free, then where were their complaints with the used CD biz? Is the record industry really taking a hit from PTP file-sharing? If so, haven't they been taking this hit since the beginning?
Whether it's borrowing an album or two from a friend, or taping records for friends is no different than someone uploading a whole wack of music onto a hard-drive and having a friend copy it over to his computer; it's all sharing. I presume that the taping of a record was considered "piracy" back in the day and considered "illegal" but the issue I'm yammering on and on and on about is that the industry wasn't really making a fuss over that as far as I'm aware so why are they now? I am probably missing some part of a bigger picture. Me is an dummy after all.
O Dummy! Y:ou forget/got about the noo digital fourmat. Nowe you can makeeasy copy from original good as same and copy to other digital format good as original. Then buy a digital music factory and hire album artists (or rent a colour copier) and produce new copies of albums and sell as original as I do at Virsion Records and become a music mogul. With yak butter, please.
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