Not necessarily. Bittorrent might have helped him spread his music. It's been known that many record companies secretely dropped their own releases on bittorrent for distribution.

But the whole distribution model has changed and you need to be able to work within the new model in order to take advantage of it.

@EOSHD

I'm sorry about your friend, but spending money on studio time before anything else isn't the wisest of decisions in this era. He would benefit from the kind of information you can find for instance in Owsinsky's Music 3.0, which covers new distribution models after the music industry as we've known it has collapsed (and rightly so because it did not any longer deal with music but with quarterly figures and shareholders) http://music3point0.blogspot.com/

I am not talking about the government. That is irrelevant to the point I am making and so is providing private details about a friend. I've made my point. It is wrong to deny small content creators money.

Frankly if music downloaders can't be bothered to pay 79 cents for a track they want, they are just being childish, penny pinching and incredibly selfish. A lot of artists don't care about being fantastically rich, they just want to get by and feed themselves. If it becomes impossible to make money on music and video thanks to piracy, then there won't be any artists - the only ones left will be the wealthy mainstream ones. Piracy hurts the small guys as well, of that I have no doubt.

Have you ever been a victim of piracy Vitaliy? I'd wager that everyone in this thread has benefited from it as consumers, so only see it from one side.

And yes US government is evil... MPAA is evil... Google is evil... So what. It is the artists I am concerned about.

Yes it happened to a friend. MegaUpload build a very profitable business on the back of stolen property. I think the free and open internet should be protected and I think Wikipedia were right to try and stop SOPA - last thing anyone needs is for professional law industry to seize on fucking the life out of people - but also SOPA has a point in that creators of original IP have right to make money from their hard work.

China is probably worse offender when it comes to copying US intellectual property for their own capital gain, to benefit of consumer and Chinese business, but zero benefit for the people who actually put the hard work in to create the products in the first place.

@EOSHD

Any real examples?

My own expirience suggest exactly reverse situation.

This is brilliant: https://twitter.com/#!/jonathancoulton/status/160374297364414464

Any other musicians out there notice that ever since they shut down MegaUpload, the money has just been POURING in?

You bet I did. A few more thousand legal downloads of my songs and I’m buying an Arri Alexa. Boy am I relieved they closed that pirate den down!

@VK I'm totally agreed with you on that; and it needs to change..!

@spirit I don't think it was just a preventive strike on that new business venture. There are some alternatives to music distribution that take only 10-15% on sales (ie: bandcamp), and we don't see that many "artists" (by that I mean mainstream) jumping ship*. Mainly because these artists are signed on labels which are very restrictive on their contracts; contracts which are usually very-long term and pretty hard to get rid of.. so the critical mass would not have been enough. Besides these traditional labels offer way more than distribution: production, marketing, tours.. so offering a way to sell creations (and just that) isn't enough: think about it, what sells more: the hyped artists signed on a major label or the band doing their quality music and putting for nothing online? Regarding Kim Dotcom, he might be a very good at building businesses; but I think doing it the way he did shouldn't be something to be proud of (the exact same thing goes to these companies enforcing copyrights).

*even with such a big potential user base, they would advertise the site & service and some if their key artists.. certainly not every Joe who sells music from there.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Exactly my point

Main goals of real copyright are:

1. Protecting common good
2. Protecting author, allowing him to get reasonable reward and make new things
3. Making and protecting distribution and information channels allowing authors to sell the product

In current form all is exactly reverse:

1. Protecting motherfuckers who own the law and restrict distribution, as well as control main informational sources.
2. Do not protect independent distribution organizations, sites, shops or techniques. Instead nuke them.
3. Take 95-99,9% from authors and call it normal (try to publish any book or music disc). Even famous Apple 30% for the right to be included.
4. Fuck the common good. As prolonged copyright prevents acess to knowledge, papers, research reports. Also this makes huge impact on families with bad education and low money, as they have much less chance to get access to the knowledge.

@itimjim you are right, let's start trolling..

Except the postal service of every country is protected under a specific law.

EDIT: And as a matter of fact, don't they actually lose money!?

@tmcat: that's just me (flaming democracy) ;). Yes you are right the issue isn't really the rhetorics (which are good on both sides, as you mentioned) but rather on the media by which they are being served (blogs v. traditional media); and, unfortunately, "the masses" don't read the blogs so much.. but damn do they watch TV!

I still don't see how it is attacking personality, I'm just attacking facts (what he did, not what he is) with little or no judgment (there should be no place for that in the law, I said "should" ;).

Yes all he did was "enable users to", but one can hardly claim they ignored what probably amount to 99% of the service's traffic was for. As you mentioned, google has been "clever" with youtube and arranged it so that copyright holders would accept their content to be hosted there under certain conditions. As long as you don't make ennemies (ie: the ones with the power that make all the money) you are fine, once you disrespect them they always find a way to twist the law so it suits them. And in this case, we are in the midst of a debacle over piracy on the internet; the chap just had "the bad site at the bad time".

We are in agreement over law: there are many types of law (natural law, moral law..) but only one can exist in our states (under the rule of law). Strictly speaking, those idiots enforcing trade rules don't make as much physical damage as murderers. But, as you said, they have the money, the nice suits and the rethorics.. combine that with democracy and you got yourself a system where they can never lose :/.